A deceptively simple question sits at the heart of stablecoin's promise as a payments infrastructure: if moving digital dollars across a blockchain costs almost nothing, why does sending money internationally still hurt? A Bank of Italy experiment across ten international payment routes has produced a concrete, uncomfortable answer. On a single $200 transfer, total costs ranged from roughly 60 cents to nearly $18 — a spread so wide it exposes stablecoins' fundamental infrastructure gap.
The findings reframe a debate that the crypto industry has been winning on optics but may still be losing on economics. Advocates of Tether, Circle, and their stablecoin peers have correctly pointed out that blockchain settlement is fast, borderless, and extraordinarily cheap at the protocol layer. That part of the equation holds up under scrutiny. The Bank of Italy's experiment confirms it: the cost of actually moving stablecoins on-chain represented only a small share of the total expense incurred.
The real cost lives on either side of the blockchain — in the act of buying the tokens in the first place and then converting them back into spendable local currency on the other end. These on-ramp and off-ramp processes, the mundane plumbing that connects legacy banking rails to crypto networks, are where the economics fall apart. Across the ten routes studied, these entry and exit points drove the bulk of fees. The blockchain leg, by contrast, was almost incidental.
This distinction matters enormously for how the industry makes its case to regulators, payment processors, and the unbanked populations it hopes to serve. When a corridor like remittances to Southeast Asia, Latin America, or sub-Saharan Africa is the target market, a $18 fee on a $200 transfer represents a 9% cost — almost indistinguishable from the traditional correspondent banking system that stablecoins are supposed to disrupt. The World Bank has long flagged a 5% global average remittance cost as unacceptably high. At 9%, a poorly routed stablecoin transfer is worse. Even at the optimistic end of the Bank of Italy's range, 60 cents on $200 represents a 0.3% cost — genuinely transformative if it could be replicated consistently at scale.
The gap between 0.3% and 9% is not a minor rounding error. It is a structural problem rooted in market fragmentation. On-ramps and off-ramps are operated by a patchwork of local exchanges, licensed money service businesses, and fintech intermediaries whose fee structures vary dramatically by jurisdiction, payment method, and user verification status. A sender using a bank transfer to buy stablecoins in a liquid, well-regulated market may pay almost nothing. A recipient converting to cash in a country with limited exchange infrastructure may absorb fees that dwarf the transfer's blockchain cost by orders of magnitude. The blockchain is not the bottleneck. The regulated perimeter around it is.
This creates a policy and product challenge that the stablecoin industry has been slow to confront head-on. Building faster, cheaper on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure requires navigating exactly the kind of Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), and licensing requirements that make global expansion expensive and slow. Regulatory frameworks like the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation impose compliance costs that, paradoxically, can make serving lower-value corridors economically unviable for smaller operators. The corridors where cheap remittances would matter most — low-income, high-diaspora markets — are often the same corridors where compliant off-ramp infrastructure is thinnest.
There are credible paths forward. Peer-to-peer off-ramp networks, mobile money integrations in markets like Kenya or the Philippines, and direct partnerships between stablecoin issuers and local financial institutions all represent attempts to reduce last-mile friction without reconstructing the full correspondent banking stack. Coinbase and other large platforms have invested in reducing on-ramp costs for retail users, and some corridors are already demonstrably cheaper than legacy alternatives. But these are islands of efficiency, not a consistent global network.
The Bank of Italy's ten-route experiment should be read as a calibration exercise, not a verdict. Stablecoins remain a credible evolution in global payments infrastructure. The blockchain rail itself has cleared its bar. What the data forces the industry to acknowledge is that clearing the blockchain bar was always the easier half of the problem. Building a cheap, compliant, universally accessible on-ramp and off-ramp layer — one that holds costs reliably below 1% rather than allowing them to balloon to 9% — is the work that remains. Until that infrastructure matures, stablecoin payments will continue to be fast, and occasionally very expensive.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Bitcoin News.