In Argentina, rent, utility bills and even part of a salary can now be paid in stablecoins. More than 15,000 businesses there accept them, and some employers pay bonuses in USDT so that workers don't lose purchasing power as the peso weakens.

That is a long way from a trading screen. Following those digital dollars from a savings wallet to the person who finally spends them shows where stablecoins already work as money and where they still get stuck.

What Makes Stablecoins Useful Where Local Currencies Lose Value?

Where a local currency loses value quickly, a dollar-pegged stablecoin lets people hold savings in dollars without a foreign bank account. The same balance can pay for goods or reach relatives abroad, sometimes at a lower cost than a traditional transfer. That protection depends on the issuer keeping the peg, and the money still has to be converted when someone needs local cash.

Our study of Latin America, presented in Forbes Brasil, brings together figures on how widely stablecoins are used there. Stablecoins account for roughly 90% of crypto transaction volume in Brazil and more than 61% in Argentina. The research draws on Chainalysis data and central bank figures among other sources, so these shares describe the regional crypto market rather than activity on a single service.

Inflation is the most visible driver. When prices rise faster than bank deposits pay, holding USDT or USDC in a wallet becomes a way to keep savings in dollars without opening a foreign account. For people who have no bank account or only limited banking services, a phone wallet gives many people a simple way to keep money and send it abroad.

Sending money home adds its own reason. According to the study, Latin America moved about $142 billion in international remittances in 2025. Traditional channels usually charge 4% to 10% for these transfers, while some crypto corridors bring the cost below 2%.

Aishwary Gupta, Global Head of Business at Polygon Labs, spoke with us for our interview on stablecoin payment infrastructure and our POL price prediction. He sees the motivation in practical terms:

People adopt a new way to pay when it makes their lives easier. If a business can pay an overseas supplier faster, or a worker can keep more of what they earn, that's a reason to use the technology. They don't need to be interested in crypto to do it.

— Aishwary Gupta, Global Head of Business at Polygon Labs

Keeping savings in dollars is only half the job. Sooner or later, much of that money has to reach a relative in another country.

Why Does Sending Money Still Feel Like Trading?

Many crypto apps are built around trading, so a simple transfer sits among charts, promotions and features the sender never needed. Each extra option is one more chance to make a mistake for someone who only wants to move money. High minimum amounts add a second barrier when the sum is small.

Pauline Shangett, CSO at ChangeNOW, ran into this inside her own family. Her cousin in Poland wants to send money to relatives in another country and can't do it through the traditional banking system. He lives in Europe, where MiCA rules apply, and needs an off-ramp into local money. She spent three weeks trying to teach him to use a large centralized exchange.

The problem, as she describes it, is the interface. On many centralized exchange apps, she says, charts and offers to try perpetual futures or memecoins compete with the one action he came for. In her TOKEN2049 keynote, covered in our piece on why the next billion users should never touch a blockchain, she put the same idea more bluntly: when thousands of people keep making the same mistake, "it is not just user error. It is a product problem." NOW Wallet users she has talked to saw only one pop-up, asking them to set up two-factor authentication. The trading features are available but not heavily advertised.

Tim Stanyakin, Head of Growth at ChangeNOW, describes the same gap in our look at why crypto UX is still broken:

You can have a technically perfect transaction, but if the user has to understand which network to choose, whether they have enough native tokens for gas, why a transaction is pending, and what happens if they send funds to the wrong address, the experience still feels broken.

— Tim Stanyakin, Head of Growth at ChangeNOW

Small amounts are another test. Pauline's example is someone in Vietnam who has won $10 in an airdrop. ChangeNOW keeps its minimums low so that a sum like this can still be used:

We barely make any revenue on them, but we do give those people the freedom to use that money in a safe and secure way.

— Pauline Shangett, Chief Strategy Officer at ChangeNOW

She goes further in her conversation with Alessandro Gibilaro on Risk Takers, explaining why payments and savings should live apart from trading in a financial app, and why a newcomer holding stablecoins shouldn't be treated as a trader.

The same need came up at the panels we hosted at TOKEN2049 Singapore. Aleksandra Korneva, co-founder of Rubic, noted that people who swap only occasionally have little reason to come back to an app every day, as BeInCrypto reported. In the same UX piece, Dayana Aleksandrova, Head of Social Media at WalletConnect, argues that mainstream users shouldn't have to become cryptographers to use financial products.

Even the simplest app, though, can't decide which network the recipient uses or when their bank opens.

Where Does a Stablecoin Payment Actually Slow Down?

The blockchain transfer itself is rarely the slow part. Time is lost before it, when the sender has to pick the right network, hold a separate coin for fees and match the stablecoin version the recipient accepts. It is lost again after it, when the stablecoin is converted into local currency on a bank's schedule.

Our interview with Gupta opens with a Friday evening. The buyer's bank has closed for the weekend, and an overseas supplier is waiting for money to buy materials for the next order. A stablecoin transfer can still go through, as long as both sides have access to the services around it.

He puts the problem from the payer's side:

People shouldn't have to spend time choosing a blockchain, buying another token to cover fees, or working out which version of a stablecoin they need. They should see what they're paying for, what it costs and whether it went through.

— Aishwary Gupta, Global Head of Business at Polygon Labs

Until payment apps handle these steps everywhere, they stay with the sender. On Polygon, a wallet needs the stablecoin itself and a small amount of POL for gas. That has to be native POL on Polygon. The ERC-20 version on Ethereum is a separate token and won't cover fees on Polygon.

The choice of stablecoin matters as well. Our guide to choosing between USDC and USDT explains that USDT dominates trading liquidity, while USDC tends to fit payments that need invoices, business records and reserve disclosures. The same ticker can still lead to the wrong route: a wallet may hold bridged USDC on a smaller chain while the receiving exchange accepts only native USDC on another network.

The slowest stretch often comes at the end: most of the delay on the route sits in converting the stablecoin into local currency. For that reason, Gupta suggests judging a payment by its total cost and by the time until someone can actually use the money.

How Should You Compare the Cost of a Stablecoin Transfer?

Compare what the recipient will receive and when they can use it, rather than the advertised fee. A transfer on one network costs only that network's fee. Once the money is exchanged along the way, network fees on both legs and the service margin come out of the amount, and a floating quote can still move before the order completes. A fixed rate locks the quote if the deposit arrives in time.

Even a direct transfer can cost very different amounts depending on the network. Our comparison of the cheapest USDT networks puts Solana, Aptos and Near below $0.01 per transfer and Polygon and BNB Smart Chain below $0.05, while TRON usually costs $1 to $2 unless GasFree is used. Our own data from September 2025 to September 2026 shows users moving toward cheaper chains: TRON is still the most used network for USDT on ChangeNOW, but its share fell from 47.9% to 38.3%, while transfer volume on BNB Smart Chain grew 82.3%.

Most of the cost comparison happens when the money changes coin or network on the way. The ChangeNOW fee breakdown shows what goes into that total. A swap involves two blockchain transactions. Sending the original coin to ChangeNOW costs a network fee charged by your own wallet, which you see before confirming. When the payout goes out, we pay the network fee for that transaction and deduct it from the amount you receive.

The service fee depends on the pair and is already part of the estimate on the screen, so nothing is added from our side after you confirm. The estimate itself can still shift. With a floating rate, the final amount follows the market until the swap is processed. With a fixed rate, the amount shown is the amount you receive, as long as the deposit arrives within the allowed time.

If you are choosing between services, the guide suggests a simple test: run the same small swap on two platforms at the same time and compare what actually arrived.

None of this makes stablecoins a mainstream payment method yet. Data cited in our Visa and Mastercard comparison puts real stablecoin payments at about 0.02% of global payment volume, according to McKinsey and Artemis, with roughly 60% of them made between businesses. "Already" in the title refers to particular places and needs, such as a rent payment in Argentina or a transfer to family abroad.

Thank you for reading. Before your next transfer, check which network the recipient uses and how much will actually land on their side.