Bank of Italy Study Finds Stablecoin Remittances Can Cost Up to 9% Per Transfer

Key points

The Bank of Italy's Paper No. 86 tracked 200 USDC transfers across 10 corridors including Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the UAE, and Japan, finding total costs between roughly 0.3% and nearly 9% of value sent.
Blockchain gas fees were negligible; the dominant costs were exchange fees, foreign exchange spreads, and local banking charges on the fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat conversion legs.
Settlement times ranged from approximately 20 minutes in corridors with domestic instant payment support to as long as two business days where recipients withdrew via conventional banks.
The Bank of Italy concedes stablecoins reduce costs in certain corridors and that always-on settlement and programmability are meaningful advantages over legacy payment rails.
The cost advantage of stablecoin remittances appears to apply most cleanly when recipients are willing to hold and spend USDC directly, a condition that is uncommon in typical consumer remittance use cases.

A Bank of Italy mystery-shopping study, published as Markets, Infrastructures and Payment Systems Paper No. 86, tested 200 USDC transfers across 10 international corridors and found that end-to-end costs ranged from roughly 0.3% to nearly 9% of the amount sent. The research challenges the widely held claim that stablecoins deliver systematically cheaper cross-border payments once the full transfer chain is considered.

The study’s central finding is that blockchain network fees are not the problem. Gas costs represented a negligible fraction of total expenses. The real cost drivers sit at the edges of the journey: converting euros into USDC at the sending end, and withdrawing into local fiat currency at the receiving end, with foreign exchange spreads, exchange platform fees, and domestic banking charges collectively accounting for the bulk of what senders actually pay. Settlement times varied equally widely, from around 20 minutes where local instant payment infrastructure could handle withdrawals to as long as two business days where recipients depended on conventional bank transfers.

The researchers stopped short of dismissing stablecoins entirely. The Bank of Italy acknowledges that stablecoins can reduce costs in specific corridors, and that always-on settlement and programmability remain genuine advantages over legacy rails. The operative constraint is the ‘last mile’: as long as most recipients need local currency rather than holding USDC directly, every fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat conversion reintroduces an intermediary and the fees that come with it. The stablecoin remittance value proposition, on this reading, holds most cleanly when both counterparties remain inside the crypto ecosystem, a condition that rarely applies in consumer remittance flows.

What this means

product owner: The study's corridor-level variance, from 0.3% to nearly 9%, points to a segmentation opportunity: identifying the specific routes and recipient profiles where last-mile fiat conversion costs are lowest and building the product proposition around those corridors rather than making uniform cost claims across all markets.
distribution & BD: Partnership strategies that assume stablecoin rails will sell themselves on headline cost need to be re-examined against the finding that exchange and banking fees dominate the real bill; agreements with local payout partners and foreign exchange providers may matter more to the value proposition than the blockchain layer itself.
regulatory & policy affairs: A central bank study documenting the gap between stablecoin marketing and measured remittance costs is the kind of empirical input that tends to inform regulatory framing; teams operating in or targeting European corridors should anticipate that this paper will surface in payment regulation discussions and consider whether their public disclosures on cost align with the full end-to-end figure rather than the on-chain component alone.
treasury & allocator: If the efficiency case for stablecoin-based treasury remittance rests partly on cost savings relative to traditional rails, the Bank of Italy's methodology of measuring end-to-end rather than on-chain costs is worth applying to internal transfer flows before presenting corridor economics to stakeholders.

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Coindesk Markets desk

coindesk.com

Bank of Italy Study Finds Stablecoin Remittances Can Cost Up to 9% Per Transfer

Key points

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