Cross-border Remittance Cost Drops to 6.36%, Stablecoins Eye Infrastructure Fix

A new report from Decentralised.co shows that the cost of sending $200 across borders has dropped to 6.36%, from 9.67% in 2009, with the United Nations targeting 3% by 2030. The report details the three-step remittance process—collection, value transfer, and payout—and notes that only the middle step, once slow, is now the cheapest. Prefunded agent accounts fragment working capital, but tokenized dollars can centralize funds into a single pool, allowing Sunday settlement and rapid rebalancing. The sector is seeing significant funding activity: Félix Pago raised $200 million for WhatsApp-based remittances from the US to Latin America, with a16z leading $87 million in equity and General Catalyst providing $113 million in credit. Nium now uses USDC to fund customer payments. a16z Crypto led a $10 million investment in Better Money. Conduit raised $36 million for the Europe-to-Nigeria and Kenya corridor, and Palla raised $14.5 million to white-label payment services to thirty banks. The report concludes that stablecoins can fix infrastructure issues but cannot fix legal or fee-collecting isolated systems.