Transferências internacionais na era blockchain: relato técnico do desenvolvimento de um comparador de custos entre stablecoins e métodos tradicionais de remessa

Abstract

Traditional international transfers, processed mainly by banking institutions through the SWIFT network (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), present high costs, long settlement times, and a number of intermediaries that, in general, only becomes known after the operation has been processed. These factors disproportionately affect senders from developing countries, including Brazil. This technical report documents the development of a technological product (a web-based international transfer cost comparator) conceived as a research instrument to investigate, in practice, whether the use of stablecoins on blockchain networks constitutes a more efficient alternative to traditional methods (banks via SWIFT, Wise, and Nomad) for sending funds from Brazil abroad, in Brazilian reais converted to US dollars. The tool integrates real-time exchange rates and fees (through the APIs of AwesomeAPI, Binance, Nomad, and Wise) and consolidates, across nineteen blockchain networks, the USDT withdrawal fees charged by Binance, adopted as the reference exchange due to its trading volume. Results indicate that the cost of a blockchain- based transfer corresponded to a fraction of one percent of the amount sent, while traditional methods presented costs between approximately 4.20% and 14.99%, based on data from the World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide, the Wise public API, and the exchange rates obtained through the Nomad API, complemented by the fees charged by the platform, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed intervention regarding the high-cost problem identified. It was also found that the number of intermediaries in the traditional banking system is structurally variable and only becomes known after the transfer is sent, unlike blockchain, in which this number is known in advance. Finally, it was identified that the practical effectiveness of blockchain depends on the recipient's degree of familiarity with digital wallets: when this familiarity is low, the amount received in stablecoin still needs to be converted into local currency, generating an additional, non-standardizable cost that is therefore outside the scope measured in this work. It is concluded that stablecoins represent a structurally cheaper and operationally simpler alternative to traditional international transfers, whose practical advantage tends to expand as the adoption of digital assets advances.