I think we all agree that the blockchain technology is in its early days (compared to the potential it has), which means it’s not accessible to everyone: documentation is limited, tools are not user friendly, users knowledge is limited.
Most people think that a blockchain address includes information about a specific blockchain, as if it was created on a blockchain or it belonged to a specific wallet used to generate it: it doesn’t. A blockchain address is just an address, it does not belong to a specific blockchain, ultimately an address is only a huge random number. What blockchain you are sending the tokens to, simply depends on what blockchain your tokens are on: in fact, you do not “tranfer” tokens, you transfer the ownership of tokens to a different address, tokens never leave the blockchain they are on.
And this is part of the fundamental knowledge that any blockchain user should have, otherwise,as some of you observed, they should never leave Coinbase-like portals (i.e. only buy/sell inside their website).
Once you withdraw from Coinbase, you are out of the “user-friendness”, and you get into the blockchain world basically alone. You must know how it works, or you’ll most likely lose your funds. IoTeX tries its best to educate the community, improve their tools, create new tools, but there are infinite ways of losing your funds in crypto, and they cannot be avoided, unless you want to convert ioPay in a enciclopedia of cyrpto with tons of documentation to be read (and understood!) before processing each single operation, from staking, to transfers, to claims, to locking or transferring deposits, using hardware wallets.
If we want to assume “the user doesn’t know anything”, then nothing could be built other than Coinbase-like things: easy for sure, and limiting for sure (you cannot haver ease of use + maximum power at the same time, not at this stage anyway).
Think of Metamask, right? It is the de-facto Ethereum wallet (not exactly a niche network!): from Metamask you can send to any 0x address (and that is also a valid IoTeX address, or Polygon’s, or Binance smart chain’s, etc… any blockchain that uses the same cryptography as Ethereum uses the same format for its addresses).
So how can ioPay or Metamask know that you wanted to send those tokens to a different blockchain other than the one they are connected to? They can’t. The fact that you are using a 0x address as the recipient means nothing in itself.
Once yourtokens leave Coinbase, it’s your responsibility to know what you are doing (that’s why Coinbase exists and is so popular among newbies). You must be aware of the fact that multiple blockchains exist, and the recipient address alone does not tell you anything about the recipient blockchain.
When you transfer tokens from ioPay (or any other wallet app) you should always ask yourself 1) what blockchains my tokens are at the moment? and 2) What blockchain the recipient expect the tokens to be? If those match, then you can safely transfer, if the recipient’s blockchain does not match the sender’s blockchain, your transfer is still valid but the recipient will not see the tokens (because they are on a different blockchain).
If you are unable to obtain this information (what chain your tokens are and what chain the recipient wants the tokens), whether because the recipient is not transparent about it, or you do not understand, you should just stop and ask for support.