Usually, when i do international transfers, i expect a fixed known rate. Transferring to bitcoin or whatever and then having to carry the risks in wild swings in value is not really my cup of tea.

You don't do bitcoin. Bitcoin is impractical. We are talking about crypto in general, not just bitcoin. Nowadays you can for example get xlm from a cex, move it to your wallet and send that. It's fast and with very low fees( lower than paypal etc). There's even a stablecoin you can exchange it for so you dont have to worry about price swings.

How low are you talking about? And hidden fees such as the spread do matter. Last i checked, which was a while ago, paypal wasn't that flash compared to alternatives.

Couple cents with current prices. Ada is reasonably low and nano is feeless but the network is supported by rainbow farts and unicorns so I wouldn't trust it much.

If you stay in crypto (e.g. usdt). Buying in is easy. Cashing it out in viable amounts is very problematic even for individuals, at least where I live. Transferring a usd-crypto-usd million would take a couple of weeks and unclear risks. In US, can you accept usdt from an exchange and grab the cash right away?

Kraken tells me my account with them allows up to $10mm per day in fiat withdrawals. (I'm in the US)

Does it give you paper cash? Because I can receive money back from Kraken to my bank account too, but that means 100% local perverted KYC AML trouble even if it’s clear that I sent the exact amount to Kraken from the same account recently.

They wire the money to my bank, of course. I've done this pretty regularly with several different banks for years, and have never been asked even a single question by any of those banks, or ever had them delay the availability of my funds.

I can't tell you from personal experience if it would be the same if my amounts were a million plus, but they are not insignificant amounts either. I'm quite sure that attempting to deposit similar amounts of physical cash at a bank would be at least somewhat challenging.