Selling Bitcoin & Cashing Out in Florida

Every way to sell in Florida, ranked by cost

Our own modelling from published operator schedules plus observed exchange-rate markups, August 2026. Excludes tax, which is separate and covered below.

Selling on a licensed exchange

Mechanically this is the mirror image of buying, and the same single decision determines most of the cost: order book, not the instant-sell button.

1. If your crypto is in self-custody, send it to your exchange deposit address. Verify the address on your own screen and consider a small test transfer first if the amount is large.
2. Open the trading section — the one with a chart and an order form — rather than the app's headline "Sell" button.
3. Choose Limit, set your price (at or slightly below the current best bid if you want it filled immediately), enter the amount, and review the fee shown.
4. Submit. Once filled, you hold dollars on the platform.
5. Withdraw by ACH, which is free on most licensed venues and settles in one to three business days. Use a wire if you need same-day.

Order-book fees on licensed venues run 0.16% to 0.40% at entry tiers — CEX.IO from 0.16% maker / 0.25% taker, Gemini ActiveTrader from 0.20%, Kraken Pro from 0.25%. Retail instant-sell flows cost 1% to 1.49% plus a spread. On a $50,000 exit that is the difference between roughly $100 and roughly $750.

Selling for physical cash

Genuinely two-way crypto kiosks — machines that dispense banknotes — exist in Florida but are a minority. Three things to know before you rely on one.

• Sell rates are usually worse than buy rates. An operator charging 10% to sell you bitcoin may effectively charge 12% to 15% to buy it back. The all-in cost of a cash exit commonly lands in the same 12% to 22% band as buying, and sometimes higher.
• Limits are low and cash runs out. A machine holds a finite amount of physical currency. Large sell orders may be refused or partially filled, and from 1 January 2027 Florida's statutory daily caps of $2,000 and $10,000 apply to kiosk activity generally.
• Two-step machines are common. Many "sell" flows have you send crypto and then return later, or receive a redemption code, rather than dispensing cash immediately.

For larger cash amounts, a Miami OTC desk is the realistic route — Athena Bitcoin runs its ACE desk from 1 SE 3rd Avenue in downtown Miami, and private-client desks operate in Brickell and at The Falls in South Dade. Expect full identity verification and source-of-funds questions, which are signs of a legitimate operation rather than obstacles. See our OTC guide.

And the safety point, because it matters more than the fee: walking out of a location with a large amount of physical cash, after a transaction that a stranger may have observed, is a genuine personal risk. If there is any alternative, take it.

Selling a large position without moving the price against yourself

A large market sell order does the same damage as a large market buy, in reverse. It consumes the best bids, then the next-best, then worse ones. Your average fill is below the price you saw, and nothing on your statement calls that a fee.

Three approaches, in order of size:

A practical note on illiquid assets: small-capitalisation tokens are where selling really hurts. Order books are thin, the spread is wide, and a position that looks worth $40,000 on a price chart may realise substantially less when actually sold. If you hold small-caps, check the visible order-book depth before you assume the paper value is achievable.

The tax consequences of every sale

Florida's position is genuinely favourable and worth stating plainly: there is no state income tax and therefore no state capital gains tax on your crypto. The prohibition sits in the Florida Constitution rather than in statute, so it is not something a future legislature can quietly reverse. Florida also levies no state estate tax.

Federal tax is unchanged and unavoidable. The IRS treats digital assets as property, which means the following are all taxable disposals:

• Selling crypto for dollars.
• Swapping one crypto asset for another — including swapping into a stablecoin.
• Spending crypto on goods or services, including via a crypto debit card. Every card purchase is a separate disposal.
• Paying someone in crypto for work or a service.

And these are not disposals:

• Buying crypto with dollars.
• Holding it, however long, through any price movement.
• Moving your own crypto between your own wallets — though you need the transaction hash to prove it was not a sale.
• Gifting within the annual federal gift-tax exclusion, though the recipient inherits your cost basis.

From the 2026 tax year, US exchanges issue Form 1099-DA reporting your disposals to the IRS. Your own records now exist to reconcile against a form the IRS already holds, not to substitute for one. Keep date, asset, quantity, USD value, fees, platform and transaction hash for every movement. Full detail on our Florida crypto tax page and capital gains page. For anything substantial, use a CPA who has done digital assets before.

Holding periods and lot selection

Two federal mechanics are worth understanding before you sell, because neither can be applied retroactively.

The one-year boundary

Crypto held for one year or less produces a short-term gain, taxed at your ordinary income rate — up to 37% federally. Held for more than one year, it produces a long-term gain taxed at 0%, 15% or 20% depending on your taxable income, plus a potential 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax.

The gap is enormous. On a $50,000 gain, the difference between a short-term rate and a 15% long-term rate can exceed $10,000. If you are close to the one-year mark, that date is worth knowing precisely.

And the 0% bracket is real and underused. A taxpayer with modest taxable income in the year of sale may pay no federal tax at all on a long-term crypto gain. Students, retirees living from savings, people between jobs, and anyone in a low-income year should understand this before selling — it is a legitimate part of the code, not a loophole.

Which coins you are selling

If you bought at several different prices, you own several different tax "lots". Which lot you are deemed to sell changes your gain. The default is generally first-in, first-out, but specific identification is permitted if you can adequately identify the units — which in practice means having contemporaneous records and, from 2026, wallet-by-wallet or account-by-account basis tracking under the current broker reporting regime.

This is genuinely technical and the rules have moved recently. If you hold multiple lots at materially different prices, the lot-selection decision is worth a conversation with a CPA before you place the order, not after.

Getting the dollars out, and why your bank may pause

An underappreciated part of selling in Florida is the last mile: a large incoming transfer from a crypto exchange may trigger your bank's fraud controls.

This is not banks being obstructive for its own sake. Florida has one of the worst crypto elder fraud problems in the country — FBI IC3 recorded 1,213 kiosk complaints in the state during 2025 with $32.8 million in adjusted losses, and the Florida Attorney General's Cyber Fraud Enforcement Unit recovered $5.4 million in a single case in April 2026. Bank fraud teams are trained to look at exactly this pattern, and sometimes that scrutiny saves someone's savings.

Three things make it painless:

• Call your bank first. Tell them a transfer of roughly that size is coming from a named licensed exchange, and why. A two-minute call prevents a two-week hold.
• Keep documentation available. Trade confirmations, exchange statements, and the exchange's Florida licence number — CEX.IO Corp is , verifiable on NMLS Consumer Access.
• Use a bank that does not treat crypto as radioactive. Some institutions restrict crypto-related transfers entirely. Florida credit unions and larger national banks are generally straightforward; if yours is not, that is a reason to open an account elsewhere before you need to sell.

And a genuine warning in the other direction: if a bank employee questions a large outgoing transfer or cash withdrawal you are making at someone else's instruction, engage with the question rather than avoiding it. That intervention is the single most effective defence against the scam described on our Florida scam page, and being coached on what to tell a teller is one of the clearest signs of fraud there is.

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