You’re an ETH minter, you’ve never minted on another chain. You know instructions will come out, but you’re anxious to “know” and you want to “know right now”. Well, here you go:
Overview
Polygon (like Avalanche, Etho Protocol, and many others) are ethereum-based, which means your ETH address (and your private key for that address) also exists and works on the other compatible chains.
If you send MATIC (Polygon) or AVVA (Avalanche) to your ETHEREUM address, guess what? You haven’t lost it. In fact, you have it. You just need to tell Metamask to read *that* chain in order to access it (sign, send, receive, and mint).
The Process
For Metamask to know which blockchain you want to access your address on, you have to plug in the basic blockchain information for Metamask to use. This is called a “Custom RPC”. Once you have that, you can switch between chains using the same address and interact with your balance at that address on that chain.
The Steps
In the interest of security, I’m not going to be linking you to anywhere in this article. Links are easy to change, hijack, etc. So I’m going to teach you how to figure this out yourself and show you a few pictures — that way, you can figure it out for other chains as you continue to explore the world of crypto and NFT’s.
Step 1: Find the official settings for Metamask (Custom RPC settings)
Search (google, duckduckgo, etc.) for “[chainName] metamask setup” and visit the blockchain’s official documentation or wallet setup guide. Since the Bapes mint will occur on Polygon, I’ll use Polygon as an example here:
Step 2: Open Metamask configuration page to add the Polygon RPC settings
- Click on your Metamask browser extension and then click the colorful circle in the top-right corner of your Metamask pop-down menu
Click “Settings” (the last option at the bottom of the menu)
In the Metamask “Settings” menu, scroll all the way down and click “Networks” (third-to-last option from the bottom).
At the bottom of the list of networks, click the blue button that says “Add Network”. This will open a new browser tab where you can add the Polygon network settings.
Now we’re going to use the information found on the Official Polygon documentation for setting up Metamask. If you searched for it and found it, this is what you’re drawing your info from:
Transcribe the appropriate information from the page (pictured above) into your Metamask Network Settings Page. It should look like this:
Click “save”. It will now show you your MATIC balance on your address on the Polygon Mainnet in that browser tab. Notice that you’re on the same address as the Ethereum address. Cool, right? You may safely close the tab.
A few helpful tips and reminders:
Open your Metamask browser extension and observe the chain (and wallet address) it’s currently set to. You’ll need to switch back and forth between these chains in order to interact with your wallet balance on each chain. So if you want to see your MATIC, you’ll need to remember to switch to the Polygon Mainnet. If you want to see your ETH, you’ll need to switch back.
If you select the chain button (highlighted above) you’ll notice an option to “show/hide test networks” — it’s a shortcut to the settings section that allows you to toggle on/off the test networks that come pre-configured with Metamask. I personally choose to do so…it’s nice and clean:
You can find that toggle option by following the link in the menu, or if you’ve previously dismissed the notification, by going to the colorful circle in the top-right, clicking “settings”, “advanced”, and scrolling down to this:
Happy Minting!
Twitter: @VestedC
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ETH/MATIC tips: 0x52107524C6CfffBE58098DEB18e066888f37D82E