Bank of Italy Study Says Stablecoins Do Not Consistently Lower Remittance Costs
Key Takeaways
- •The Bank of Italy study found that stablecoin transfers do not systematically offer lower costs than traditional remittance channels across the tested corridors.
- •Total transfer costs for USDC remittances ranged from 0.3% to nearly 9% of the amount sent, with fiat on- and off-ramp frictions identified as the primary cost driver rather than blockchain settlement fees.
- •While stablecoins were cheaper than Wise on certain routes such as Italy to Argentina, they were more expensive on others including Argentina to Italy and transfers between Italy and the UAE.
- •Blockchain settlement typically completed in 15 to 20 minutes, but total transfer times varied significantly based on whether destination countries had instant payment systems or relied on traditional bank transfers.
- •The research concludes that stablecoins alone cannot guarantee faster or cheaper remittances and that meaningful benefits depend on the efficiency of underlying traditional payment infrastructure.
The Bank of Italy has challenged one of the biggest claims surrounding stablecoins, finding that they do not consistently offer lower costs than traditional remittance services.
In a new study, researchers conducted a mystery shopping exercise involving 200 USDC transfers across 10 remittance corridors linking Italy with Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan. USDC, issued by Circle, is the second-largest U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin by market capitalization. The findings showed that while stablecoin transfers can be cheaper in some corridors, they do not provide a systematic cost advantage over conventional money transfer services.
The study said that, to properly evaluate the systemic impact of stablecoins, a recent and rapidly expanding strand of economic literature has moved beyond theoretical debates and focused instead on the empirical dissection of the stablecoin ecosystem. This empirical turn has developed along distinct but interconnected dimensions.
Three are particularly relevant:
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The geographical localization of cross-border stablecoin flows.
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The rigorous quantification of genuine economic activity, meaning the isolation of transactions that more closely resemble payment activity by excluding non-economic on-chain flows such as bot-driven activity, high-frequency trading, and intra-exchange transfers, which are prevalent on general-purpose blockchains.
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The granular assessment of end-to-end transactional efficiency.
The study found that total transfer costs ranged from as little as 0.3% to nearly 9% of the amount sent, depending on the remittance corridor and the service providers used. Researchers attributed the wide variation primarily to fiat on- and off-ramp costs, exchange rate spreads, and withdrawal fees, rather than blockchain settlement costs.
The report said:
“Stablecoins show no systematic cost advantage over traditional channels . . . On and off‑ramp frictions are the main source of cost and transfer duration.”
To benchmark the results, the Bank of Italy compared stablecoin transfers with Wise across the same payment corridors.
Stablecoins proved cheaper for transfers from Italy to Argentina, Italy to South Africa, and Brazil to Italy. However, they were more expensive on routes including Argentina to Italy, Italy to Brazil, and transfers between Italy and the UAE.
To address this limitation, the table below compares stablecoin transfer costs with those charged by Wise on the same bilateral corridors and for the same transaction amount, thereby allowing a more granular corridor-level assessment.18 The USDC transfers and the Wise simulations were conducted on different dates, 25–26 March and April 14, 2026, respectively.
The most striking finding was the wide variation across corridors: total costs ranged from 0.30% for the ITA→ARG transfer to 8.96% for the reverse ARG→ITA corridor. That range, spanning from well below the 3% G20/UN SDG target to far above the current global average, highlights the difficulty of generalizing about stablecoin efficiency.
The G20 and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals have set a target of reducing remittance costs to below 3% by 2030. According to World Bank data, the global average cost of sending remittances has hovered around 6% in recent years, meaning even traditional channels remain well above the international target. The Bank of Italy findings suggest stablecoins do not, on their own, close that gap.
The research also found that blockchain settlement itself typically took between 15 and 20 minutes, but the overall transfer time depended heavily on local payment infrastructure. Countries with instant payment systems, such as Italy and Brazil, processed deposits and withdrawals in less than a minute, while jurisdictions relying on traditional bank transfers, including South Africa, experienced delays of up to two business days.
“As a consequence, the speed advantage associated with stablecoin settlement disappears in this corridor, as the total transaction time becomes comparable to that of traditional bank transfers,” the researchers wrote.
The report concludes that stablecoins alone do not guarantee faster or cheaper remittances and instead depend on efficient traditional payment infrastructure to deliver meaningful benefits. The findings come as European regulators implement the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, which introduced comprehensive stablecoin rules across the EU in 2024, increasing scrutiny of reserve requirements and operational standards for token issuers operating in the bloc.
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