You all know these gas fees are too damn high! It's pretty annoying when you're trying to move a small amount of crypto and/or anything Ethereum-based from one exchange to another (CEX or DEX) and you're prompted to pay a fee that feels just ridiculous. My first suggestion to anyone trying to minimize the fees would be to check out the withdrawal/network fees for XLM (Stellar Lumens) on their exchange. While every exchange will be a bit different, here's how much it would cost for me to withdraw the Top 15 coins (incl. stablecoins, except for BUSD) from a CEX (KuCoin) right now:

BTC: 0.0005 BTC (~$20.25) ETH: 0.00625 ETH (~$18.98) USDT: 35 USDT ($35) BNB: 0.01 BNB (~$4.17) USDC: 15 USDC ($15) XRP: 0.25 XRP (~$0.20) SOL: 0.01 SOL (~$1.01) ADA: 1 ADA (~$0.95) LUNA: 0.05 LUNA (~$4.02) AVAX: 0.01 AVAX (~$0.77) DOGE: 20 DOGE (~$2.94) DOT: 0.1 DOT (~$1.83) UST: 2 UST ($2) SHIB: 1,100,000 SHIB (~$28.42) WBTC: 0.0007 WBTC (~$28.35)

XRP is the cheapest here at a pretty modest $0.20 withdrawl fee. Not too shabby. Now, as someone who is also a fan of NANO, I had to check that one too:

XNO (NANO): 0.02 XNO (~$0.04)

Okay, 4 pennies is pretty damn cheap so what's the big deal? Why XLM? Well...:

XLM: 0.02 XLM (~$0.0041)

It costs less than half of a single penny to withdraw my XLM from KuCoin. To compare, I'd pay over 10 times more money to withdraw NANO instead. On top of that, XLM is a tradable currency at a lot more exchanges than NANO.

I tested this out by sending 10.5 XLM (~$2.10) from Coinbase Pro to Binance.US to KuCoin, then BACK to Coinbase Pro. All 3 CEX withdrawls cost me a grand total of 0.03 XLM (~$0.006), leaving me with 10.47 XLM (~$2.094). Still not even a single penny in fees.

Of course, trading fees exist and vary from exchange to exchange. Some have free currency conversion, some don't. So swapping from your preferred currency to XLM and back might cost a small amount of money, but it will still very likely be cheaper than withdrawing the original currency itself.

If any of you have a strategy like this that you use, or one that's even better, I'd love to hear it! And of course, be sure to do your own research before trying this.