For years, stablecoins have been marketed as crypto’s breakthrough application for cross-border payments, promising near-instant transfers at a fraction of the cost charged by traditional remittance providers.

Sending USDC across a blockchain may indeed cost only a few cents but a new study from the Bank of Italy suggests that isn’t what most people actually pay when they send money home.

In a mystery-shopping exercise spanning 10 international remittance corridors, researchers found that stablecoin-based transfers were not systematically cheaper than conventional money transfer operators once the full journey, from bank account to crypto wallet and back into local currency, was taken into account.

The study, published as Markets,…