Can't do that folks! That's an apples-to-oranges comparison. A traditional remittance, say like those offered by banks or transfer companies such as Wise, is made up of a bundle of four services. By contrast, a stablecoin transfer (I'll use USDC as my example) offers just one service. To accurately compare USDC to a remittance platform like Wise, you've got to add back the three missing services, and their associated costs. Here are the four bundled services that Wise offers when you make a cross-border tra
Next, I'll have to do a foreign exchange swap on BitBuy, trading out of USDC and into Canadian dollars. Alas, BitBuy's USDC-to-Canadian dollars market isn't very liquid, and the best rate I could get when I checked yesterday was 1.3569 (compared to the institutional rate of 1.3598). The loss from a loose bid-ask spread is called slippage , and it represents an implicit but very real C$6 fee. On top of that I'd have to pay a 2% trading fee to BitBuy, or C$54. (If I was a high-volume trader, the fee would be
However, keep in mind that what I'm describing (i.e. using BitBuy or NDAX to convert USDC to Canadian dollars) represents just the second leg of the entire remittance route. I haven't even included the fees that my U.S. sender must incur to onboard into USDC, nor have I accounted for any on-chain fees. By contrast, Wise will do both legs of this transfer for just US$14 . That's tough to beat.