Everyone knows that Polygon network’s gas fee is so low. But it was such a mess to get Matic on Polygon in the first place. And there are so many traps to even get the right Matic. After various trials, we finally find one of the cheapest and hassle-free ways to get Polygon Matic.
Step 1: Install KuCoin on your phone and Register an account with your ID(it’s miraculously NY resident friendly).
Step 2: Select Deposit.
Step 3: Select Fiat and search for USD.
Step 4: We are going to use Visa/MasterCard as payment method here. Note that no matter if you’re using credit card or debit card, you will be charging 3.8% fee.
Step 5: After successfully purchased USD fiat money, go back to the dashboard and slide right (yes it has two panels) to find “Buy Crypto” tab.
Step 6: Then you choose USDT as your crypto to buy (the default is Bitcoin), and then choose Pay with USD balance (Additionally you can also buy USDT directly with your credit/debit card, but it will cost couple cents more, I tried both methods and this way takes the least amount of fees).
Step 7: Now you have some USDT in your main account, however, to trade USDT for Matic, You need to transfer your USDT in your main account to the trading account (Idk why they make it this way either because it’s one more step). So after click on Transfer in your home page (you need to slide right to the second panel again to see this icon, which is right next to the Buy Crypto icon), you choose the crypto as USDT and click All and transfer all USDT to your trading account and then hit Confirm.
Step 8: Then go to your home page again and search for MATIC/USDT. Click on Buy and it will bring you to the following page: You can change Limit price to Market price if you want to buy it in market price. You can also pick the amount of Matic you want to buy in percentage. And most importantly in the last red circle, there should be non-zero amount of available USDT for you to trade (if it’s 0 balance, you probably didn’t transfer your USDT from your main account to trading account). Then you can hit Buy MATIC.
Step 9: After you bought Matic, you need to go to the Transfer page again (See Step 7 if you forgot how to get there), and select Matic, transfer your Matic from Trading account back to Main account, why? Because you can only withdraw using your Main account in KuCoin. Hit Confirm.
Step 10: Finally go to the Asset tab in the button and it will bring you to a page where you can withdraw your Matic. Click on Withdraw.
Step 11: Couple of important things here. So You select Matic to withdraw, and it will be withdraw from the Main Account, then you copy and past your crypto wallet address (recommend using Metamask) and select MATIC as your network. To the very button the fee should be very low, just 1 Matic. If you select Ethereum network, the fee would be something like 24 Matic, and you will have to bridge the Ethereum Matic to the Polygon Matic, which will cost another big chunk of fees. Just to be sure, you can try to withdraw small amount of MATIC to Polygon to see if it’s delivered to the address (probably will take ~5 mins to deliver). Hit Confirm.
Finally, you can use your MATIC in your wallet and mint NFT on Polygon network. The total cost of the whole transaction is just that initial 3.8% bank fee + 1 Matic.
Note: A lot people might be wondering why there are two different Matic? You can check-out the following reddit post:
In short, if you transfer your Matic to the Ethereum network, you not only have to pay a high gas fee (since it’s Ethereum gas fee not Polygon gas fee), and you also can’t use it to mint the NFTs that are on Polygon network unless you bridged it to Polygon, since the contract is pushed to Polygon network, not Ethereum’s.
This is Ethereum Matic, and ERC20 Token. If you import Matic on the Ethereum Main Net, you will see this blue symbol.
This is Polygon Matic. If you go to the Polygon main net, you will see this symbol without importing any token since it’s Polygon’s native token.
