Bank of Italy Finds $200 Stablecoin Transfers Cost Up to $18

Bank of Italy Stress-Tests Ten Remittance Routes

A $200 payment in stablecoins can cost anywhere from about 60 cents to nearly $18 by the time it reaches the recipient. The spread comes out of a mystery-shopping exercise the Bank of Italy ran across ten international payment routes, and the study notice on the central bank's site sets out the method. The blockchain leg of the trip was cheap. Buying the tokens at the start and converting them back into local currency at the end drove most of the expense, while moving them across the blockchain node network accounted for only a small share of the total.

The study measured the whole journey rather than a single fee. Across the sampled routes, all-in cost ranged from 0.30% to nearly 9% of the amount sent, and the researchers frame that as the price of a complete remittance, not a global average cash-out charge. Each stage of the trip can carry its own charges, and an exchange-rate spread can shave the final payout even when the advertised transfer fee reads zero. Before recipients can compare prices, the exercise suggests, they face unfamiliar choices between wallet addresses, blockchain networks and the separate tokens used to pay network fees. The exposure is not marginal. A survey by BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider acquired by Mastercard, found freelancers, gig workers and marketplace sellers receive roughly 35% of their income in digital dollars. For a wage that lands in a crypto wallet while rent still has to leave a bank account, a near-9% leak on conversion decides how much of the paycheck survives. The utility of these tokens across industries is well established; the open question is how much money is left once it reaches somewhere usable.

Ramps, Not Rails, Carry the Cost

A working paper from the Bank for International Settlements examines the same pressure point, looking at how conversion and withdrawal costs affect stablecoins' competitiveness against banks and fintech remittance services. Industry operators see the bottleneck from the spending side. Speaking at TOKEN2049, RedotPay's Taylor Bossung put it plainly: “On-ramping and off-ramping is still too expensive.” His company issues physical and virtual cards that let users spend stablecoins at more than 130 million merchants, and his example was a customer withdrawing a large amount for a substantial purchase such as a down payment. Buying groceries with a stablecoin-funded card does not make that kind of withdrawal affordable. KAST, a global money app built on stablecoins, is attacking the interface side. Chief executive Raagulan Pathy described the goal as keeping money movement as simple as the technology allows while the user experience looks like Web2, with familiar actions such as sending money to a phone number. “What people care about is money, not the instrument underneath,” he said. A simpler screen removes work from the customer, but behind it someone still has to arrange conversion and delivery, and a convenient payroll process can leave employees with the job of making their wages spendable. Recipients also start from different positions: some want to keep digital dollars, others need local currency immediately, and someone starting with ordinary money must also count the cost of buying in. The benchmark matters here. The World Bank's Q3 2025 global average for remittances stood at 6.36%, and its digital-only money-transfer-operator index at 3.54%, so judging stablecoins only against the most expensive corridors flatters the result. Bossung expects regulation to do part of the work: “It lets on- and off-ramp providers negotiate better deals, and a competitive market then drives down the price of core functions.”

The load-bearing document here is the Italian study itself, and its message is narrower than the headline spread suggests: the 0.30% to nearly 9% range describes the full buy-transfer-sell journey on ten sampled routes, not a universal withdrawal fee. Against the World Bank's 6.36% benchmark, the cheapest stablecoin corridors already beat traditional rails by a wide margin; the expensive ones do not. The variable is the ramp, which is a commercial and licensing problem more than a technical one. For PayFi products built around wages and cross-border payouts, the test a recipient actually runs is how much arrives, how soon, and whether it can be spent without another costly conversion.