A Bank for International Settlements (BIS) working paper published Oct. 19 found that trading and cash-out charges can reduce the savings from low blockchain fees on cross-border stablecoin payments.
The paper’s authors, Wenxin Du, Catherine Huang and David Scharfstein, modeled a $100 dollar-to-euro transfer using Coinbase, Ethereum and Kraken, followed by a SEPA bank withdrawal. Their example assigned about $0.19 to the blockchain transaction, 1% to trading on Kraken and €1 to the withdrawal.
The 1% Kraken rate applied to traders with less than $10,000 in monthly volume. The researchers collected trading-fee information in May 2026 and withdrawal-fee information in February 2026; those figures describe the model’s inputs, not current charges.
To compare payment routes, the authors examined personal bank wires and fintech transfers. Exchange-rate markups in their small wire sample ran from roughly 2% to 4.7%, before wire fees. In the fintech data, median costs for a $10,000 transfer from the United States were about $40 to $60 across developed-market currency groups, although some destinations, including Japan, Hong Kong and Switzerland, cost considerably more.
A stablecoin payment can incur charges when the sender obtains tokens and again when the recipient converts them into local currency. Receiving the tokens does not necessarily give the recipient immediate access to the proceeds in a bank account.
The authors found favorable stablecoin exchange rates on some routes into emerging markets and linked them partly to capital controls and demand for dollar exposure. Thin trading and changing prices, however, limited the amount that could be transferred at those rates.
The findings add cost data to the local payout gap in stablecoin payments that Coinbase and Thunes said their planned connection would address. The companies identified bank accounts and mobile wallets as payout channels but gave no estimate of savings. For a particular payment, the paper points to trading depth, the available exchange rate and withdrawal charges as factors that determine the total cost.
