Getting paid from abroad in digital dollars

When a client in another country pays you, the money crosses a border, and on the usual routes each bank or payment company it passes through can take a cut and some time. Digital dollars offer another route. They’re stablecoins, tokens a company issues, each meant to be worth one dollar, and two make up most of them: USDT, issued by Tether, and USDC, issued by Circle. Together they held more than 80% of the value of all stablecoins in May 2026, according to the Bank of Italy. The client sends digital dollars to an address you give them, and they arrive in minutes, at any hour. The transfer is the easy part. Whether you come out ahead depends on what the client pays to get them, what you pay to turn them into money you can spend, and what can go wrong on the way, since a payment like this can’t be undone.

What a bank transfer costs

Start with the usual route. As of March 2025, a business sending 5,000 USD to a person in another country paid 1.8% on average, most of it in the exchange rate, according to data compiled for the Financial Stability Board, which tracks the G20’s goals for cross-border payments. Of the services that tell customers how long a payment takes, fewer than half credited it within one business day, and 3.5% within an hour.

The receiving bank can take a cut of its own. In a survey of banks and payment companies for the same report, those on the receiving end charged 0.9% on average on payments of 500 to 4,999 USD and 0.2% on payments of 5,000 to 19,999, and a margin of about 1% more when they converted the money into local currency.

Small amounts cost more. Sending 200 USD cost 6.5% on average in early 2025, and sending 500 USD 4.3%, according to the World Bank’s figures on remittances as the FSB reported them: more than twice the 3% set as the goal for 2030 in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

What the client needs from you

The client needs digital dollars, bought on an exchange or already in a wallet, and four things from your invoice:

• The token: USDT, issued by Tether, or USDC, issued by Circle. They’re different tokens from different companies, and not every exchange takes both: Kraken, a large exchange, no longer offers USDT to its customers in the European Economic Area. Some networks also carry bridged copies, made by whoever runs the bridge rather than by the issuer, such as the “USDC.e” found on some networks, which Circle doesn’t issue or back.
• The network. A transfer stays on one network, the same at both ends, and the two tokens aren’t on all the same ones: Circle issues USDC on 38 blockchains, Base among them but not Tron, and Tether’s list has USDT on Tron, Ethereum, Solana and others, but not on Base. Kraken warns that a deposit sent on a different network from the one its address was created for is lost.
• The address, pasted, never typed, and checked in full.
• The amount that must arrive. The sender pays to buy the digital dollars and send them; you pay to sell them and withdraw the money. Naming what must arrive keeps the client’s costs with the client.

Both issuers say it plainly in their terms: transactions in USDC, and in Tether’s tokens, “are not reversible,” and whoever sends to a wrong address bears the loss. With a new client, a small test payment first costs one more network fee and settles the doubt. The guide on sending and receiving digital dollars goes through the steps.

What it costs from end to end

In March 2026, Italy’s central bank sent 200 USDC between exchanges in Italy and five other countries and priced every step. It used USDC, one of the two, because it was available on exchanges in every country in the test: unlike USDT, the study explains, it could be bought legally through regulated providers both in the European Union and in Japan. The sender paid local money into an exchange, bought USDC and sent it on Ethereum; the receiver sold it and withdrew the money to a bank account. On the eight routes it could compare, as a share of the amount:

Step	Who pays	What it cost	How long it took
Paying into the exchange	The sender	Nothing by bank transfer on most routes, 0.58% on two; by card, 6.17% together with the purchase	Under a minute, but one or two business days on one route
Buying USDC	The sender	0.53% to 5.36%	Under a minute
Sending it on Ethereum	The sender	0.4% on average, from 0.01% to 1.4%	Under 15 minutes, about 30 on one route
Selling USDC	The receiver	Up to 2.84%	Under a minute
Withdrawing to a bank	The receiver	Nothing or 0.58%; one exchange listed 3.4%	Under a minute, but up to two business days on two routes

The whole trip cost from 0.30% to nearly 9%, depending on the route, the exchanges and how the money was paid in. One sender had no bank account and could only pay by card, which added a 3.8% surcharge. Where the banks at both ends had instant payments, the money reached the receiver’s account in under 20 minutes; where they didn’t, it took one or two business days. The transfer on the network was, in the study’s words, a marginal share of the cost; most of the cost, and the waiting, came from getting into USDC and out of it.

Against the usual channels, the result was mixed. The trip cost less than the World Bank’s average for remittances from three of the four sending countries the study compared, but a money transfer company quoted less on four of the seven routes it listed. The study’s verdict: “no systematic cost advantage over traditional channels.”

Why your numbers may differ

The test sent 200 USDC, the amount the World Bank uses for remittances. An invoice may be larger, and fees that don’t grow with the amount weigh less on it. On Ethereum, the study explains, the network fee depends on the computing a transfer needs, how busy the network is and the price of ether, and what an exchange charges for the transfer is its own price, which can differ from what the network costs. Networks differ too: on Solana, used for one route, the transfer cost 0.15%. And Ethereum was quiet that March; its fees jump when it’s busy, as they did in March 2024. The token can change the sum as well: differences in liquidity, business model and regulation, the study notes, can make costs differ from one stablecoin to another.

The exit is where much of the cost sits, and it can wait. The study’s authors write that if digital dollars could be spent as they are, without turning them back into local money, the advantages of paying in them would be “substantially higher.” If you keep part of a payment in dollars, to spend or save, that part pays nothing to convert until you convert it.

No one can reverse it

That cuts both ways. A payment by card can be disputed after the fact: under US rules for credit cards, a cardholder has 60 days from the statement that shows the charge to claim that services weren’t delivered as agreed. A payment in digital dollars that has arrived can’t be reversed by the client.

Nor can a mistake be undone. Digital dollars sent to a wrong address, or on the wrong network, can be lost for good, and attackers plant wrong addresses on purpose. In address poisoning, they send tiny transfers from an address whose first and last characters match one the victim pays often, so that a copy from the transaction history picks theirs. Researchers counted 270 million such attempts on two networks between July 2022 and June 2024, and at least 83.8 million dollars lost. Your client should paste your address from your invoice, never from their history.

The issuer can freeze it

Each issuer can stop its own token. Circle can block transfers of USDC to and from any address that it determines, “in its sole discretion,” may be associated with illegal activity. Tether’s terms let it freeze USDT, or blacklist an address that holds it, when it determines or suspects a prohibited use, “in its sole and absolute discretion.” A wallet you control protects your dollars from an exchange freezing your account, not from the issuer. The guide on digital dollars has the cases.

The exchange will ask who you are

To turn digital dollars into money in your bank, you’ll go through an exchange, and an exchange has to know its customers: KYC. In the United States, FinCEN’s rules require businesses that move crypto for others to verify their customers’ identity. In the European Union, since December 2024, when a payment arrives from a wallet that isn’t at an exchange, your exchange has to find out who sent it, asking you if it can’t tell, before it lets you use the money; above 1,000 EUR, it also has to check whose wallet it came from. Get verified before the first payment arrives, not on the day you need the money, and keep your invoices: they show what each payment was for.

Scams aimed at people who work remotely

Payments no one can reverse attract scams, and remote work is one of their ways in.

• Jobs that ask you to pay. In 2025, people reported 363 million dollars in losses from employment fraud to the FBI, 288 million of it in cases involving crypto. In one common version, which the FTC calls a task scam, you’re promised pay for simple online tasks, then asked for a deposit to withdraw earnings that were never real. Reports of it rose from about 5,000 in all of 2023 to about 20,000 in the first half of 2024, according to the FTC, whose advice is short: “Never pay anyone to get paid.”
• Overpayments. A client “accidentally” pays too much and asks for the difference back. With a check, the FTC warns, a bank can take weeks to find out it’s fake, and by then the money you sent is gone. With crypto, check on the network that what arrived is the real token before you believe it: on Ethereum and networks like it, anyone can create a token and give it any name, and Tether and Circle each list the contract address of theirs on every network they issue on.
• Fake invoices. Criminals who break into an email account, or imitate one, send payment details of their own. It’s called business email compromise, and people and businesses reported losing about 3 billion dollars to it in 2025, according to the FBI. Your client can be the target, with your invoice as the bait. Agree on the address once, and confirm any change through a second channel, as the FBI advises.

The guide on crypto scams goes through more of them.

Taxes and rules are your country’s

How income received in digital dollars is taxed, and whether turning it into local money later counts as a sale, depends on where you live; this guide can’t answer it for you. A token doesn’t keep the payment out of sight either. Under an OECD framework that 76 jurisdictions have committed to, crypto platforms identify their users and report their transactions to tax authorities, which pass the information on to the users’ countries of residence; the first exchanges are due in 2027. Some countries also prohibit using or trading crypto, the Bank of Italy’s study notes. Ask your tax authority or an accountant before the first invoice, and keep a record of every payment: the date, the amount and what it was for.

Side by side

	Bank transfer of 5,000 USD from a business	200 USDC in the Bank of Italy’s test
What the sender pays	1.8% on average, most of it in the exchange rate	0.53% to 5.36% to buy USDC, more by card, and 0.4% on average to send it
What you pay	At your bank, 0.2% on average at that size, and about 1% more to convert	Up to 2.84% to sell, and up to 3.4% to withdraw
How long	Fewer than half of services within one business day	Minutes on the network, at any hour; under 20 minutes to a bank with instant payments, one or two business days without

What to do

Digital dollars are worth considering when speed matters, when your bank takes a large cut, or when you’d keep the dollars anyway. It isn’t cheaper by default: the cost depends on the exchanges at both ends and on how the money goes in and comes out.

• Compare what lands in your account. For the same amount on the same day, work out what you’d receive by bank transfer, through a money transfer company and in digital dollars sold on your exchange, every cost included.
• Put the token, the network and the address on the invoice, with the amount that must arrive. Choose a network both sides support, and ask a new client for a small test first.
• Agree on the address once. Treat any change, from either side, as a scam until you’ve confirmed it by a call or another channel.
• Get verified at your exchange before you’re paid, and keep your invoices.
• Never pay to get paid, and never send back an overpayment until you’ve seen on the network that the real token arrived, at the contract address its issuer lists.
• Convert only what you need, when you need it. Every conversion pays the spread. Keep the rest in a wallet you control rather than on the exchange, and if it’s savings, in a setup that passes the test in the guide on hardware wallets, multisig and collaborative custody.
• Ask about taxes before the first invoice, not after the first year.