IMF Study Puts $200 Stablecoin Remittance Cost at 2.18%

18 Countries, 270 Corridors Measured

A working paper that IMF researchers published in October, Deconstructing the Stablecoin Sandwich, estimates the average cost of sending $200 abroad in stablecoins at 2.18%, once every step of the journey is paid for. That is under the G20's 3% target for remittance costs. The figure covers the full trip: a fiat deposit into an exchange, the stablecoin purchase, the on-chain transfer, the sale on an exchange in the recipient's country, and the final fiat withdrawal. The authors call the structure a stablecoin sandwich, because only the middle leg touches a blockchain while both ends still run through conventional payment rails.

The team, from the IMF's Monetary and Capital Markets department, collected fee schedules manually from 29 centralized exchanges across 18 countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the euro area, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, India and Nigeria. They modeled Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) transfers across five blockchains, which produced 270 directional corridors and 4,005 complete routes. The working paper assumes senders always pick the cheapest available on-ramp and off-ramp, so the 2.18% is a modeled corridor average rather than any individual user's bill.

Decomposed, trading fees charged on each order-book trade were the largest item, averaging 0.85% of the amount, followed by fiat on-ramp and off-ramp costs at 0.67% and the crypto transfer itself at 0.48%. The leg most often cited when stablecoin savings are touted, the blockchain transfer, makes up less than a quarter of the total. The median corridor came in at 1.99%, but dispersion ran from -2.18% to 8.03%. Transfer size matters as well: fixed withdrawal fees push the average rate on a $50 remittance to 4.12%, while a $5,000 remittance averages 1.54%. Choosing median rather than cheapest cash-in and cash-out methods lifts the $200 average to 3.04%, and the priciest methods to 4.07%.

Where Traditional Providers Still Win

Average savings do not hold on every route. Across the 33 corridors where the study could pair stablecoin costs with the World Bank's Remittance Prices data, stablecoin routes averaged almost 5 percentage points cheaper than the traditional providers' average. The World Bank put the global average cost of a $200 remittance at 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025, more than double the G20 target. But when the comparison is made corridor by corridor between the cheapest stablecoin route and the cheapest traditional provider, roughly one third of the 33 corridors still favor the incumbent money-transfer firm.

Local pricing explains part of the spread. Where a stablecoin trades above the benchmark exchange rate on a domestic exchange, direction changes everything. South Korea is the paper's example: the long-running kimchi premium means outbound senders buy USDT or USDC at a markup, while inbound recipients sell into a market that pays more won than the benchmark implies, at times producing the negative costs at the bottom of the range. The authors caution that a negative figure is not a profit on the transfer, only a distortion against the benchmark, and note the premium had narrowed or reversed by the first half of 2026, after the sample period.

The paper was written by André Reslow, Edona Reshidi, Andrew Usher, Jeanne Verrier and Marcello Miccoli, all of the IMF's Monetary and Capital Markets department. It prices only transfers between centralized exchanges: peer-to-peer deals, decentralized exchanges and DeFi routes are excluded, as are non-price frictions such as transfer speed, account opening and identity verification. Capital controls, anti-money-laundering rules, exchange licensing, payment infrastructure and market competition are listed as likely drivers of the country-by-country gaps, left to follow-up research. The IMF stresses that the paper represents its authors' views.

Fees, Not Chains, Set the Cost

The decomposition redirects the remittance cost debate toward the legs that get the least attention. The blockchain transfer, the piece both critics and advocates fixate on, is the cheapest component at 0.48%, while exchange fees and fiat rails together carry roughly three quarters of the total. The practical issue is comparison: the gap between the cheapest and priciest cash-in methods on a $200 send, 2.18% against 4.07%, exceeds the entire average cost. For users, checking published fee schedules across the Best Crypto Exchanges matters more than picking a chain. For the industry, the third of corridors where traditional providers stay ahead is exactly where stablecoin cost claims need the closest reading.