The Bank of Italy Put Stablecoin Remittances Through a Real-World Test. One Fee Erased the Blockchain Advantage

Stablecoins are supposed to make sending money across borders cheap, fast and painfully simple.

The Bank of Italy decided to test that promise with real money instead of a white paper.

Its researchers bought USDC, moved it between exchanges and converted it back into local currency across ten international corridors. The blockchain worked quickly and cheaply.

The rest of the payment often did not.

The 28-page Bank of Italy study used a mystery-shopping exercise, meaning researchers acted as ordinary customers and executed actual transfers rather than relying on advertised prices. They sent 200 USDC through routes connecting Italy with Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and Japan.

The researchers measured every phase: funding an exchange account, buying USDC, sending it onchain, selling it in the destination market and withdrawing local currency to a bank. That end-to-end design exposed costs that disappear when a stablecoin company quotes only the blockchain fee.

Total costs ranged from 0.30% to 8.96% of the $200 transfer. The underlying onchain movement averaged about 0.4% across the comparable corridors and fell as low as 0.01% on the Brazil-to-Italy route.

The expensive pieces were usually attached to fiat. Exchange trading charges, card funding, currency conversion and withdrawal fees determined whether the same USDC looked revolutionary or ordinary.

CASE STUDY 🇮🇹 | Fiat Rails, Not Blockchains, Drive Stablecoin Costs, Says a Bank of Italy Study

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… pic.twitter.com/wuQi3tVGz8

— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) August 1, 2026

The sharpest example ran from the UAE to Italy. The available credit-card funding route carried a 3.8% surcharge, while withdrawal and exchange costs pushed the total to roughly 9%.

Going from Brazil to Italy cost only 2.21%. Reversing the direction cost 2.70%, showing that a corridor is not one product with one price; each direction can use different exchanges, funding methods and local rails.

Argentina produced an even wider split. Italy-to-Argentina appeared to cost just 0.30%, while Argentina-to-Italy reached 8.96%.

The study warned that Argentina’s multiple exchange rates complicate that comparison. USDC sold for pesos at a premium to the official retail dollar rate, making one direction look cheaper and the other more expensive for reasons tied to currency controls and dollar scarcity rather than blockchain performance.

A more market-based conversion rate would have raised the first route to about 0.5% and reduced the reverse route to approximately 8.5%. The enormous gap would remain.

✦ Bank of Italy concludes stablecoin remittances lack consistent cost advantages:

A recent study by the Bank of Italy revealed that stablecoin remittances do not consistently outperform traditional payment methods in terms of cost and speed. The research indicated that most…

— ZoneCrypto (@_ZoneCrypto_) August 1, 2026

The results were more favorable when stablecoins were compared with the World Bank’s broad country averages. USDC beat those averages for transfers originating in Brazil, Italy and South Africa, but lost badly on the UAE route.

A tougher comparison against Wise produced a split decision. USDC was cheaper in three comparable corridors and more expensive in four.

That finding is more useful than a universal winner. Remittances are local products stitched across two countries, and the cheapest provider can change when the direction, exchange, bank or funding card changes.

The Brazil-to-Italy route showed the technology at its best: 2.21% through USDC versus roughly 4.68% to 4.89% through Wise. Italy-to-Brazil went the other way, with USDC at 2.70% against approximately 2.20% through Wise.

Speed followed the same pattern.

The blockchain transfer finished in less than 15 minutes in seven of eight comparable corridors and took about 30 minutes in the remaining South Africa-to-Italy test. It was rarely the bottleneck.

Where domestic instant-payment systems connected banks and exchanges, the entire remittance could finish in under 20 minutes. Italy’s TIPS, Brazil’s PIX and Argentina’s Transferencias 3.0 made the crypto leg feel seamless because the fiat legs could keep up.

South Africa’s standard bank transfers stretched the process to one or two business days. The USDC still crossed the blockchain quickly, then waited on the banking system around it.

Japan exposed a different problem. Retail access to dollar stablecoins was concentrated through one domestic operator, and direct outbound transfers to foreign exchanges were unavailable.

Researchers had to insert an unhosted wallet and split the process around quantitative limits. The measured cost could look competitive while the user experience became too complicated for an ordinary remittance customer.

Cointelegraph highlights the study’s most important conclusion: stablecoins become substantially more efficient when recipients do not need to convert them back into cash. If a recipient can pay rent, school fees, merchants or suppliers directly in stablecoins, the final sale and withdrawal disappear.

That is the payment industry’s real challenge. A faster blockchain cannot eliminate the cost of entering and leaving the blockchain when daily life still runs in local fiat currency.

It also explains why stablecoin adoption can grow rapidly without immediately destroying conventional remittance companies. The token improves the settlement layer, while established providers still control bank access, identity checks, local liquidity and the final payout.

A stablecoin company that wants the full economic advantage must therefore solve more than issuance. It needs dense local liquidity, direct bank connections and enough merchant acceptance that recipients can avoid cashing out after every payment.

The study has limits. It tested one $200 amount, focused on USDC and used Ethereum for most routes during a period of low network congestion.

Other blockchains could make the onchain portion cheaper, but that portion was already marginal in most of the experiment. A one-cent blockchain transfer does not rescue a route carrying a costly card deposit, thin local liquidity or a large cash-withdrawal fee.

The Bank of Italy did not find that stablecoin remittances fail. It found that they win selectively—and that their biggest weakness often sits outside crypto.

That conclusion cuts both ways. Banks cannot dismiss the blockchain when the onchain leg is routinely the cheapest and fastest part of the transfer.

Crypto companies cannot advertise that narrow success as the price of the whole journey.

The stablecoin can cross an ocean in minutes. The expensive part is still getting ordinary money onto the first shore and usable money off the other one.

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