Bank of Italy Study Reveals Stablecoin Remittance Costs Reach Up to 9 Percent

The remainder accumulated at fiat on-ramps, off-ramps, and FX conversion points. The central bank concluded no systematic cost advantage exists over traditional rails.

Corridor cost dispersion

Italy-to-Argentina cleared at 0.30%, the cheapest route. The reverse direction—Argentina-to-Italy—hit 8.96%. Researchers flagged that the low outbound Argentina figure partly reflected gaps between official and market FX rates rather than blockchain efficiency alone. Brazil-to-Italy cost 2.21%; Italy-to-Brazil reached 2.70%. South Africa-to-Italy printed 5.44%, while Italy-to-South Africa logged 4.58%. Both UAE corridors ranked among the most expensive at 7.20% and 8.95%, driven by card funding and local withdrawal charges.

Compared against Wise simulations for identical $200 amounts, USDC was cheaper on three routes—Italy to Argentina, Italy to South Africa, and Brazil to Italy—and more expensive on four, including both UAE corridors and Italy to Brazil.

Settlement speed and fiat bottlenecks

On-chain leg completed in under 15 minutes on seven of eight directly comparable corridors. Full settlement varied by domestic payment rail. Routes using Italy's TIPS, Brazil's Pix, and Argentina's Transferencias 3.0 finished inside 20 minutes. South African corridors extended to one or two business days due to standard bank transfer friction at the fiat endpoint. Japan presented a regulatory barrier: outbound transfers required an unhosted wallet with fragmented transactions, unsuitable for direct timing comparison.

The paper frames stablecoin rails and domestic instant-payment systems as complements, not substitutes.

Reserves and liquidity read

For USDT and USDC issuers, the structural finding is clean: on-chain cost remains low and predictable. Frictions concentrate at exchange funding, local withdrawal rails, and FX spread capture. Attestation quality and treasury composition matter less than corridor-specific liquidity provisioning and partner integrations on fiat endpoints. The study's authors cautioned that findings cover one stablecoin and a limited transaction set, and cannot be generalized across providers.

For corridors where USDC lost to Wise on cost—UAE in both directions, Italy to Brazil—the implication is direct: crypto marketing strategy targeting those lanes will not offset structural fee disadvantages with efficiency narratives.

What to track next: Banca d'Italia Governor Fabio Panetta's broader framework on cross-border fast-payment system interconnect, March 2026 BIS follow-up work on interoperability standards, and whether corridor pricing data from larger deployments like Borderless.xyz's 260 business-payment corridors diverge materially from these central-bank findings.