Off-Chain

Off-chain describes any crypto activity that happens outside a blockchain's ledger: trades matched inside a centralised exchange, balances tracked by a custodian, price data assembled by an oracle provider, or signed messages exchanged in a payment channel. Off-chain systems are fast and cheap because they neither pay for block space nor wait for consensus, but they replace cryptographic verification with trust in whoever keeps the records. That trade-off matters in practice: an exchange balance is a claim against a company, not coins you control, and only an on-chain settlement transaction moves real ownership. Many designs deliberately mix the two, doing the heavy work off-chain and periodically anchoring the result on-chain so users keep a way to enforce it.