What is an off-ramp?

Most off-ramps are exchanges: you sell USDC for dollars or euros on the exchange, then withdraw the balance to your bank. Some payment providers fold the two steps into one order. Either way a regulated off-ramp asks who you are before the first withdrawal, and for a company that means KYB rather than a passport photo.

An off-ramp has three prices, and only one of them is called a fee. The rate you sell at sits some distance from the mid-market rate; the withdrawal carries its own charge; and your bank may charge for the incoming transfer. The sale is instant and the bank leg is not: it moves at the speed of the rail, same day on a domestic transfer, days on an international wire (ACH vs SWIFT has why). On a cheap route the whole cash-out lands near 0.2%, on a careless one near 5%, and the payment cost calculator shows what that does to a payout.

The part that surprises people is that an off-ramp is a disposal. Selling 2,000 USDC for euros is a sale of an asset at today's rate against what it cost when it arrived, and the difference is a realised gain or loss, on a stablecoin too, whenever your books are not kept in dollars.

The withdrawal itself is neither a sale nor income: it is your own money moving from one of your accounts to another, and counting it as revenue is the most common way a crypto month gets overstated.

How this shows up in Orla

Orla is not an off-ramp and does not turn crypto into bank money. What it does is read the one you used. An exchange connected with a read-only key delivers the sale as a trade, with the lot it consumed and the realised gain worked out by the cost basis method you chose, and in the journal for your accountant a crypto sale posts three lines: the proceeds, the cost leaving the books and the gain on its own line.

Moving money between your own accounts is never income and never spending, so the withdrawal that lands at the bank is paired with the exchange side as one transfer. The Exchange button in Orla swaps one coin for another inside your own wallets and is not a way out to fiat; Orla's fee on a swap is shown on the Our fee line before you sign, already inside the amounts.