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The Bank of Italy ran 200 real USDC transfers. The results weren’t flattering for stablecoin boosters — but they weren’t a death blow either.
Researchers sent those 200 USDC remittances across 10 payment corridors, connecting Italy with Brazil, Argentina, Japan, the UAE, and South Africa. The goal was simple: compare total costs and settlement times against conventional remittance services. What they found cuts against the usual crypto pitch. Blockchain fees? Basically nothing. The real money drain comes from exchange fees and currency conversion — the fiat on-ramps and off-ramps that every stablecoin transfer still depends on. So the “cheap blockchain” argument kind of falls apart the moment you zoom out to the full transaction picture.
Costs swung wildly. Anywhere from 0.3% to nearly 9%.
That’s a massive range, and it pretty much tells you everything. The 0.3% end looks great on a slide deck. The 9% end is worse than most wire transfers your grandmother uses. Where a corridor landed on that spectrum depended heavily on local infrastructure and, critically, local regulation. Transfers cleared in under 20 minutes where instant payment rails already existed. Where they didn’t? One to two business days — which is no faster than a standard bank transfer and offers zero bragging rights.
How Stablecoins Stack Up Against Wise and the World Bank Benchmark
The World Bank pegs the global average remittance cost at 6.65%. Against that number, stablecoin transfers looked competitive in most corridors. Fine. But the more interesting comparison is against Wise, the fintech platform that’s already disrupted traditional remittances by squeezing margins hard. Stablecoins only beat Wise in three out of seven comparable corridors. Four corridors, Wise won. That’s probably not the headline the stablecoin industry wanted.
And it matters because Wise isn’t some legacy bank charging 8% and hoping nobody notices. It’s a lean, tech-forward competitor. If stablecoins can’t consistently undercut Wise, the “cheaper and faster” narrative needs serious qualification.
The study didn’t frame this as a condemnation. It’s more nuanced than that. The researchers pointed to domestic instant payment infrastructure as a key variable — invest in better payment rails locally, and stablecoin remittances get more competitive fast. The blockchain layer isn’t the bottleneck. The local financial plumbing is.
Regulation Is Shaping — and Warping — How Stablecoins Move Money
Regulatory design came up repeatedly as a factor that can make or break a corridor’s efficiency. Prohibitionist regulations don’t kill demand for stablecoins — they just push users toward offshore platforms. And offshore platforms bring their own risks, their own fees, and a lot less consumer protection. Restrictive frameworks that stop short of outright bans still complicate retail operations enough to erode whatever cost advantage stablecoins might otherwise offer.
It’s a mess, basically. Users want the product. Regulators in some jurisdictions make accessing it legally complicated. So users route around the rules, which adds friction and cost, which makes the remittance more expensive, which is the exact problem stablecoins were supposed to solve.
The EU’s MiCA framework and the U.S. GENIUS Act are both live now, setting new rules for crypto assets and payment stablecoins specifically. Whether those frameworks help or hurt corridor efficiency probably depends on implementation details that aren’t fully clear yet. MiCA at least creates a unified licensing regime across EU member states, which could reduce fragmentation. The GENIUS Act’s impact on cross-border flows is murkier.
Meanwhile, the stablecoin market has grown to around $307 billion — up roughly 16% over the past year, per DefiLlama data. That growth didn’t happen because remittances are broken. Stablecoins found plenty of other use cases: trading, DeFi collateral, dollar access in high-inflation economies. But remittances were always part of the pitch, and the Bank of Italy’s work suggests that pitch needs more work before it holds up consistently.
The fiat friction problem isn’t new. Anyone who’s actually used a stablecoin for a real cross-border payment knows the blockchain leg is the easy part. Getting local currency in at one end and out at the other — that’s where time and money disappear. The study’s point about fiat on- and off-ramp frictions is probably the most actionable finding here. Fix those, and the underlying blockchain efficiency actually starts to matter. Don’t fix them, and you’re just moving the same old costs around with extra steps.
There’s also a speed asymmetry worth noting. In corridors with instant payment infrastructure, stablecoins were genuinely fast — under 20 minutes. In corridors without it, the settlement time collapsed to something indistinguishable from traditional methods. The stablecoin isn’t slow. The receiving bank is slow. That’s a political and infrastructure problem, not a crypto problem, but it lands on the stablecoin’s scorecard anyway.
The 200-transfer sample covered 10 corridors. Unclear whether the researchers plan a larger follow-up study or whether this remains a one-off snapshot.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What did the Bank of Italy find about stablecoin remittance costs?
Costs ranged from 0.3% to nearly 9% across 10 corridors, with exchange fees and currency conversion — not blockchain fees — driving most of the expense. Stablecoins beat the World Bank’s 6.65% global average in most corridors but only outperformed Wise in three out of seven comparable corridors.
How fast were stablecoin remittances in the Bank of Italy study?
Transfers settled in under 20 minutes where instant payment infrastructure existed; without it, settlement took one to two business days — comparable to traditional methods.
