Banca d’Italia has released a July 2026 study finding that stablecoin remittances do not consistently beat traditional transfer services on cost or speed.
Researchers executed real transfers of 200 $USDC across ten corridors linking Italy with Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and Japan.
The mystery-shopping study recorded total costs from 0.30% to almost 9%. The blockchain leg averaged only 0.4%, while exchange purchases, funding methods, withdrawals and foreign-exchange conversion produced most of the expense. The authors said stablecoins showed “no systematic cost advantage” over traditional channels.
Stablecoin remittance costs varied sharply by corridor
The Italy-to-Argentina transfer was the cheapest at 0.30%, while Argentina-to-Italy cost 8.96%. The study warned that the low outbound Argentina result partly reflected differences between the country’s official and market exchange rates, rather than blockchain efficiency alone.
Brazil-to-Italy cost 2.21%, compared with 2.70% in the opposite direction. South Africa-to-Italy cost 5.44%, while Italy-to-South Africa reached 4.58%. The two UAE routes were among the most expensive at 7.20% and 8.95%, partly because card funding and withdrawal charges increased the total.
$USDC beat Wise in only three comparable routes
Banca d’Italia compared its transactions with Wise simulations for the same $200 amount. $USDC was cheaper in three routes: Italy to Argentina, Italy to South Africa and Brazil to Italy. It was more expensive in four, including both UAE routes and Italy to Brazil.
The researchers cautioned that the transfers and Wise simulations occurred on different dates. They also described the World Bank comparison as an indicative benchmark rather than a like-for-like test. The paper covers one stablecoin and a limited number of transactions, so its findings “cannot be readily generalized” to every provider or corridor.
Fast domestic payments determined transfer speed
The onchain portion took less than 15 minutes in seven of eight directly comparable corridors. However, complete settlement depended on the banking systems used to fund exchanges and withdraw local currency.
Transfers involving Italy’s TIPS, Brazil’s Pix and Argentina’s Transferencias 3.0 finished in under 20 minutes. South African routes took one or two business days because standard bank transfers slowed the fiat endpoints. The study therefore found that stablecoin rails and domestic instant-payment systems worked as complements, not substitutes.
Japan presented a separate problem. The Japan-to-Italy transfer cost 1.6%, but regulatory limits required an unhosted wallet and fragmented transactions, making the process unsuitable for a direct timing comparison. The reverse route cost 1.3% without completing the final off-ramp.
Better on-ramps may matter more than cheaper blockchains
The findings support Banca d’Italia Governor Fabio Panetta’s May assessment that stablecoins may work in selected corridors but do not provide a universal answer to expensive remittances. He argued that regulators should improve domestic payment infrastructure and connect fast-payment systems across borders.
A March 2026 BIS paper reached a related conclusion, identifying weak interoperability, fragmented standards and institutional differences as the main barriers to cheaper cross-border payments. That suggests blockchain settlement alone cannot remove compliance, banking and local-currency bottlenecks.
Industry deployments continue to test the other side of the argument. As crypto.news reported, Borderless.xyz found competitive stablecoin pricing across 260 business-payment corridors during the second quarter. In related coverage, a Hyundai trial moved $20,000 between the U.S. and Mexico in about seven minutes, while SBI Remit partnered with Fasset to develop stablecoin remittance infrastructure.
Those cases do not directly contradict the central-bank experiment. They involve different transfer sizes, business models and endpoints. The next step is broader testing across more tokens, providers, dates and transaction amounts, with full disclosure of exchange spreads, withdrawal costs and local payout times.
