CashApp doesn’t seem any different than Wise; I routinely use both — including CashApp for crypto.

Who are these middlemen? The miners?

At the other end when you need to convert your crypto to real currency.

It's a very weird comment as people who actually use crypto (not flipping or holding) are those who without other viable choices. They're not replacing something. Those transactions would simply not happen without crypto.

Notice that the parent comment didn't use the word replacing.

This. Wise is good as long as you can open an account there. For many people this is not a viable option.

Yep, they can open a wise account to send money, but they cannot receive money using WISE, they have to open a business account to receive money and they cannot open one in their countries.

No, the parent used the word "bypassing", which implies someone being replaced by nothing.

You're entirely wrong about that. A bitcoin transaction costs me pennies a wire transfer costs me $40.

Most real financial transactions need to start and end in fiat though, and that's where the costs are

That depends though. I recently bought a car in south America and they were willing to take USDT through Bianance Pay. As a US person I don't have access to that so ended up having to wire transfer. I don't know why they wouldn't accept a Bitcoin deposit which they could have easily converted to tether but I suspect it's just a momentum and learning curve thing.

There are pretty big markets in these countries because of crypto and even then it never reaches the native currency a lot of the market uses either us dollar or euro. Businesses are glad to accept dollars and euros for most bigger purchases especially p2p marketplaces. The myth that you have to off-ramp crypto is no longer true.

Wise demands a massive fee through bid-offer spread, they're more expensive than many regular retail banks for FX conversion. They're basically running a deceptive advertising campaign due to customers not knowing about bid offer spread.

Wise is even worse than "zero-fee" stock trading platforms like Robin hood who do payment for order flow. At least PFOF is more competitive and regulated and you're only getting a few basis points stolen from you instead of like 80 basis points.

Wise fees are sometimes big, but I find them fairly transparent about it.

From my own comparisons, when converting, say, $1000 USD with Wise the spread+fee is about half of any of the banks that I have accounts with. Where Wise takes a huge cut is if you convert $10 at a time.

Then I suppose it depends on the FX pair and the bank. I was looking at $8k USD equivalent and the bid offer was worse than my retail bank