How to Unwrap WETH to ETH.

381e35

381e35

11/11/2026

#plugs#ethereum#weth#how to
is
held as an ERC-20 token. Every unit of it is backed by one
sitting in the WETH contract, so unwrapping is not a trade. You hand the contract your
, it burns it, and it sends the same amount of
back. There is no price, no slippage and no fee beyond the gas for the transaction.
You usually end up holding
because a swap, a vault or a lending market paid you in it. You need plain
to pay gas, to send to an exchange that only takes native
, or to use an app that asks for it.

The Three Ways To Unwrap

In a swap interface. Most swap apps treat
to
as a special case. Pick
as the token you pay and
as the token you get, and the button changes from "Swap" to "Unwrap". The rate shows exactly 1 to 1 because the app calls the WETH contract directly instead of routing through a pool.
On the contract itself. On Ethereum, the WETH contract is 0xC02aaA39b223FE8D0A0e5C4F27eAD9083C756Cc2. Open it on a block explorer, connect your wallet under "Write Contract", and call withdraw with the amount in wei: 1
is 1000000000000000000. Getting the decimals wrong is the usual mistake, so check the number before you sign.
With a plug. The plug below reads how much
your wallet holds, lets you type the amount in normal units, and unwraps it.

Unwrap With Plug

Use in App
It runs on Ethereum and does four things, in order:
  1. Reads the
    balance of the wallet that runs it and shows it to you before you run anything.
  2. Uses that balance as the most you can enter, so you can't ask for more than you have.
  3. Takes the amount you want to unwrap.
  4. Calls the unwrap action, which burns that much
    through the contract's withdraw and returns the same amount of
    to your wallet.
Open it, connect the wallet that holds the
, type an amount and run it. The plug reads your own wallet, so nothing in it is tied to anyone else's address.

What It Costs

Unwrapping has no fee. The WETH contract pays out one for one, and the only cost is network gas for the transaction. On Ethereum at the gas prices of late 2026, a fraction of a gwei, that comes to cents. When the network is busy it costs more, and that is true whichever of the three ways you use.

On Base

Base has its own
at 0x4200000000000000000000000000000000000006, and it unwraps the same way: one for one through withdraw. The unwrap action works on Base too, so the same steps run there with the Base token in place of the Ethereum one.

When You Want To Go The Other Way

Wrapping is the mirror image: send
to the WETH contract's deposit and you get the same amount of
back. Apps that only take ERC-20 tokens, like most lending markets and many swap pools, need it in that form.

Protocols ยท 2

How to Earn Interest on USDC With Aave on Base.Programmable Ethereum Transactions Without Smart Contracts.

How to Unwrap WETH to ETH.

Back