USDT fees?

[Greg123]

Hello, I'm new to crypto, and to USDT in particular. Here’s a short description of a problem I encountered trying to get some expierience with this coin.

I had some BCH (Bitcoin Cash) stored in my Edge wallet app. I exchanged (swapped) 11$ worth of it into USDT (Avalanche) and received 11 USDT. So far so good. Then, I wanted to change my USDTs back into BCHs. I got a message “not enough AVAX” to complete
the exchange.

So I tried to send my USDTs to 2 other wallets (one of them Binance), hoping I could change it there. However, both transactions were rejected for the same reason - “not enough AVAX” and “insufficient funds”. After a bit of research on what AVAX is, I found it was another crypto, used to pay transfer fees over the crypto network.

I then tried to exchange or send smaller amounts of USDTs, but I kept receiving messages of insufficient funds even for 1 USDT.

Is it possible that even the smallest operation with USDT involving some network traffic consumes more than 11$ in fees? Or maybe I’m doing something wrong? How can I recover the money stuck in the wallet?