Can I stake my tokens? Can I vote? Will I receive airdrops? The answer to these questions is simply no if you hold your EOS in an exchange account. It might be convenient to hold your EOS in an exchange account, but you will not be able to use your EOS to its fullest potential. That is why we have created this guide, which will explain all the steps you need to take to gain control of your EOS.

How to get started

If you are reading this guide, you most likely have your EOS on an exchange and you don’t know how to start taking them off of the exchange. So let’s start with the basics.

The first thing you should know before attempting to withdraw your EOS to a wallet of your own, is that EOS has an account system. This means that you need to create an account on the EOS network before you are able to withdraw your tokens from the exchange.

How EOS accounts work

An account is a human-readable name that is stored on the blockchain. It can be owned by an individual or group of individuals depending on permissions configuration. An account is required to transfer or otherwise push a transaction to the blockchain. — EOSIO Wiki

Every EOS account is 12 characters long and contains the characters a-z and 1–5. An EOS account consists of 2 keys, the active key and the owner key. The active key can be used to transfer funds, vote for block producers, buying ram, etc. The owner key shows ownership of the account and is needed to make any changes to the ownership the account. This key is best kept (safely) offline, as it is not needed to do most things on the EOS network.

How to get an EOS account

There are various ways to create an EOS account, such as using cleos or using one of the available toolkits. For this guide we will use this toolkit. To create a new EOS account you need to use an existing EOS account. If you do not have an existing account you can use a tool which creates an account for you, for example the EOS account generator by EOSVibes, or Zeos *Use these tools at your own risk and always research if a tool can be trusted.*

First of all you have to download Scatter, a browser extension. You can get Scatter here. Follow the instructions on how to set up your Scatter account and login to your Scatter extension. After that go to the toolkit and connect your existing EOS account.

After you have connected your account you can go to ‘Create Account’ and fill in the blank spaces. You can use existing keypairs as the owner public key and active public key, or you can generate new keypairs in Scatters under the ‘Keypairs’ tab.

We recommend not changing the ‘net stake’, ‘CPU stake’ and ‘RAM purchase’, unless you plan on making a lot of transactions, or plan on actively using your EOS. If this is the case, stake more for CPU and net with a 10:1 ratio (as you will run out of CPU much faster than you will run out of net). To give you an idea of how much you should stake, staking 1 EOS for CPU is enough to make multiple transactions per hour.

The cost of creating an account (using the above settings) can be calculated in the following way: (Current RAM price/Kb)*3+0.1+0.1=The minimum amount of EOS required to create a new account.

How to withdraw your EOS to your account

Now you have created an EOS account, you can start withdrawing your EOS to your account. First of all make sure you are still able to login to your Scatter extension. If this is stil possible, proceed.