Switched settlement to USD and the payouts stopped — should have read the small print

Posting this against myself because it was entirely avoidable and someone else is going to do it next month.

BTC-only checkout, lightning for the small stuff, settled in btc since I opened the account. Fine for two years. Last week a supplier started insisting on a wire, so I flipped settlement to USD in the dashboard to save myself a leg of conversion.

That flip is not a setting. It is an application. Immediately after flipping it the payouts stopped and the account is asking for the full file — incorporation, ownership, a bank in the business name, the lot. $3,260 of settled btc that was withdrawable on Monday is not withdrawable now.

The documentation does say that fiat settlement triggers full verification. I had read it. I read it as a thing that happens when you first set up fiat, not as a thing that reaches back and holds an existing crypto balance.

you asked a US-regulated company to touch a dollar. that's the whole story

The reach-back is the part worth internalising, and it is not specific to this operator.

Verification tiers are properties of the account, not of the transaction. The moment you request a capability that sits in a higher tier, the whole account is re-evaluated at that tier, including balances that were perfectly withdrawable under the old one. There is no design in which they let you take the crypto out while an elevated review is open, because from their side the review is about who you are, not about which asset you asked for.

So: never change a settlement setting while you are holding a balance you would mind losing for a month. Empty it first, flip it, then decide.

Can you flip it back? In two cases I have seen with other operators, reverting the setting before submitting anything closed the review and the crypto withdrawal came back within a few days. In one it did not and the review continued regardless.

Worth trying before you send a single document, because once documents are in the file there is nothing to revert.

For what it is worth, the supplier wanting a wire is the underlying problem and it will recur; a one-off conversion through an exchange you already hold an account with would have cost you a fee and no verification event.

I appreciate that is advice about last week rather than about this week.

flipping it back worked. reverted on the 15th, sent nothing, btc withdrawal came back on the 19th. full $3,260 out same day and the account is on the old tier again.

five days and zero documents, which against everything else in this subforum is a rounding error. paid the supplier through an exchange leg like quietaccountant said, ate about forty dollars of spread, and that is the correct price for not opening a file on myself.