Sent funds (USDT) to a smart contract to get the funds on an exchange. But sent on wrong network - are those funds lost, like the exchange tells me?

Question

• Some time ago I wanted to send some funds from my hotwallet (Metamask) to an exchange (Bitpanda).
• I sent 0,5 ETH and rd. 5.200,- USDT to the wallet on Bitpanda.
• Then figured out I sent on the wrong network (BSC instead of ERC)
• The exchange tells me that they don't use EOAs (externally owned accounts), they use smart contracts. So they cant get these funds on the other chain.

Ist this true? cant they deploy something to get these funds?

SC on ERC: https://etherscan.io/address/0xa92429fc30A68f8A6435CA2697874aEC329f0984#code

They said they cant reach the funds - They thought about mirroring a contract call or something like that, but nothing would work. The adress on BSC isn`t a contract account, its a normal adress and they cant reach it.

My question is: Is there any way for them to reach the funds?

Answer 1

Smart contracts on different networks have different addresses and are not interoperable with each other. So the exchange may not be able to retrieve the funds directly.

Answer 2

A formula is used to calculate the smart contract address at deployment time. How is the address of an Ethereum contract computed?.

It is possible to deploy a contract with the same address in multiple blockchains, if they are 100% compatible with the EVM formula.

Usually the problem with centralized exchanges is that for security reasons there is limited access to the deployer private keys. Also having secure access to an unsupported network could be quite expensive.