Imagine that you are trying to swap your coins on PacakeSwap but the Exchange says that you have an Insufficient balance. This is despite the fact that you are absolutely sure you have enough BNB in your wallet.
PancakeSwap won’t tell you much apart from that you can’t complete your swap. And you are nervously waiting for a miracle to happen.
But luckily, resolving the “Insufficient BNB Balance” error takes just a few minutes.
In this article, you will learn what causes “Insufficient Balance” and how to fix this error. And soon you will be able to complete your transactions again.
What does “Insufficient Balance” mean on PancakeSwap
This error is very straightforward. You do get an Insufficient Balance error because you don’t have enough balance in your wallet. Let me explain.
There are two possible scenarios of why this is happening to you.
- You have a low slippage tolerance, or
- You have the wrong version of your token – most commonly a wrong version of BNB
The cryptocurrency market is highly volatile. Thus, even the time from when you press the button to execute the trade until the trade is actually executed, the price can change quite a lot.
And this is when the slippage tolerance comes in. Slippage tolerance ensures that you don’t get a lot fewer crypto tokens from your trade than you expect.
For example, you have set your slippage tolerance to 2%. That means that your trade won’t execute if the price from the time you have pressed the button to the actual execution of the trade move by more than 2%.
How to fix “Insufficient BNB Balance” on PancakeSwap
Solution 1: Check you’re holding the right token
The majority of crypto tokens can be held and traded on different chains. It is still the same token, but certain exchanges can manipulate only with a limited amount of chains. For instance, PancakeSwap is BEP-20 Decentralized Exchange.
So your BNB or any other token must also be on BEP-20. Certain wallets can send your tokens over another chain leading to the Insufficient BNB Balance error.
To solve that you will need to bridge your tokens to the right, BEP-20, chain.
To do this, you will need to work with your particular wallet. If it’s a multichain wallet you’ll probably be able to bridge them directly in it. If not send it to a multichain wallet or Cryptocurrency Exchange and then send it back to a wallet that supports BEP-20 and can be connected to PancakeSwap.
Solution 2: Increase your slippage tolerance
As stated above the slippage tolerance highly limit your transactions, as by default it is set to only 0.5%. But you can easily set the slippage tolerance according to your preferences.
Head to PancakeSwap and fill in your transaction details as usual.
As you can see in my trading pair THC/BUSD the default slippage tolerance is 0.5%. That’s not enough. If you take a moment, you will probably see that the price has moved by more than that amount.
To increase the slippage tolerance head to the settings – the small gear icon.
A window with various settings will pop up. Here you can also change, for example, the gas fees – if you want the transaction to be executed faster, set higher gas fees. You can set a transaction deadline that causes the PancakeRouter: EXPIRED error. And also the slippage tolerance we are looking for.
Now increase the slippage tolerance. The perfect solution is 12%. However, if you want to save money, you can gradually increase the value. I would recommend starting with at least 6% and increasing until the trade is made.
Conclusion
The “Insufficient Balance” error is caused either by low slippage tolerance or by holding the wrong version of your token.
To solve this you can easily increase your slippage tolerance in the PancakeSwap settings.
On the other hand, if you are holding the wrong version of your token you will need to bridge it to the BEP-20 chain.
However, we can give no direct guidance on this as you will need to work with your specific cryptocurrency wallet.
Unfortunately, this type of error message is not the only one you can be experiencing. That’s why we’ve created an entire series focused on troubleshooting PancakeSwap errors. Click on the name of the error and it will take you to an article dedicated to it:
- Insufficient Output amount error
- Cannot Estimate Gas error
- Unsupported Chain ID
- Insufficient Balance
- Pancake K error
- PancakeRouter: Expired
- Pancake: TRANSFER_FROM_FAILED
- Price Impact too High error
Or all the articles can be found in one place, here.