This actually applies to the US as well. Anytime you need to send $1k+ to a stranger the process is a pain in the ass.

> ACH, most bank does not allow send to stranger, and it takes 1~3 days for settlement among those which allow.

> Wire, expensive ~$30 per transaction.

> Paypal/Venmo/CashApp, Schrödinger's fraud trigger you never know it's gonna work or not. Plus they report to IRS so more paperwork during tax season.

> A lot of banks report every transaction of your checking account to credit bureaus.

So stable coin is my preferred way, and luckily among my circle it is widely accepted. Any amount is instant with a few cents fee at most.

Very similar use case but even for smaller amounts. I try to be as free software as possible so USDC is my go to alternative to Venmo/Apple Pay. I would use GNU Taler if it worked with U.S. banks.

I guess Zelle is the replacement. I've sent thousands to strangers with it with zero problems or fees. I don't like it at all because it is private and in my view a way for banks to avoid accountability.

But also zelle isn't really an option if you are anything bigger than a single person business.

I use Wise often to move money between USD, EUR, and AUD, and it plugs right into my US credit union and brokerage accounts. International transfers settle in under a minute to Australian and European bank accounts in my experience.

When you send USD to an AUD account via Wise, no money actually travels between the US and Australia. Wise maintains massive pools of local currency in bank accounts all over the world. When you deposit USD, it goes into Wise’s US bank account. Wise's software detects the deposit and instantly triggers an internal payout from Wise's Australian bank account to the recipient's AUD account. Because Wise is using local banking networks on both ends (like FedNow or RTP in the US, SEPA Instant in Europe, and NPP/Osko in Australia), the transfer can settle in seconds. It’s essentially a matching engine, not an international wire.

Credit risk and identity dictate the speed of the funding step. If you stripped KYC out of the equation entirely, the bottleneck wouldn't just be speed — the legacy banking system would refuse to route the transaction at all.

It is important to distinguish that you are fundamentally involved in a credit network, pulling funds not pushing funds, that just gives the illusion of speed. For verified users, the sub-minute speed is a mix of local real-time banking rails and Wise extending short-term trust that the incoming funds won't bounce. For an unverified or high-risk user, Wise forces a holding period until the money physically clears, dragging the process back down to standard banking speeds.

Neither does money "travel between the US and Australia" for a regular old SWIFT and correspondent banking based international bank transfer. When you send money internationally, your bank also "taps into pools of local currency" of their various correspondent bank(s). All of this could also happen instantly if they wanted it to; SWIFT is a real-time messaging network.

Wise's innovation was to provide their service "over the top", i.e. unbundle wire transfers from your bank's default offering. This has driven down both speed and pricing, in the same way that dial-through (e.g. calling card based) long distance carriers created massive competition and drove prices down in long distance calling, while under the hood it was all still just regular phone calls.

When you send USD to an AUD account by any mechanism no money actually travels between the US and Australia. Usually USD is transferred from one US bank to another, and AUD is transferred from one Australian bank to another.

Wise, like any other fintech is fun until it randomly closes your account and bans you. No one can ban you from Crypto, that's a good selling point imo.

Wise, like any other fintech is fun until it randomly closes your account and bans you. No one can ban you / freeze your assets with Crypto, that's a good selling point imo.

Only if you stay in cryptoland. As soon as you hit someplace with fiat rails, in a jurisdiction that requires adherence to regulatory requirements, your account is just as regulated.

Crypto has its own failure modes: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

(day job is in US financial services, have consulted on implementing aml/kyc/sanctions support for where crypto rails meet traditional finance infra)

Aren’t there fees to convert fiat from/to crypto on both ends?

You can make the fees rather than pay them if you make the market. There are decentralized exchanges where this can be done ~trivially for even low amounts. The fees are for those who want instant gratification.

That sounds like a lot of complexity for the average user.

Yes — there’s fees converting from/to fiat and when sending the crypto.

You’ll generally have the conversion slippage and transaction fee regardless - so the difference is the second conversion.

In practice, that isn’t too expensive and worth it for the speed; though that may change if you’re sending larger or smaller amounts than I am (in $1k-10k range).

Edit:

Replying by edit due to rate limits — but subcontracting and personal loans, eg, until a client pays.

Being a consultant is hard; being a consultant with no support network is harder.

I’m curious - under what circumstances are you exchanging $1k-$10k with friends internationally?

They send me packages with contents I distribute to my friends and neighbors.

I know we're not on Reddit, but have to say - username checks out.

Or a service like Wise which is cheap and takes a few minutes most of the time.

Never had much of a need for other services when transferring across the globe.

They're not available everywhere, and the neo-banks in general are tightening their processes to a point where they're becoming difficult to use. I've had multiple situations now where Revolut denied things like a tap payment at a restaurant in NYC because it was an "unknown recipient". Of course they don't notify you of it, leading to an awkward 5 mins with the waiter while I rummage through the app to figure out why I can't use my own money this time. Fast and convenient it ain't

Wise isn’t a neobank though, it’s a transfer service.

Personally, given that story, I’d stop using Revolution!

Revolut! Damn you autocorrect!

I suspect parent is using "a service like Wise" even though they believe they're using Crypto. That's because for an end to end transaction to complete in under 10 minutes it has to be performed by an exchange (not actually settled on chain). There are many cases like this where the "crypto" part is just theater. Money is being moved the tradition way by altering records in a non-distributed database.

Depends on the chain. Some networks are quite fast.

But it could also be theater, yeah. A friend of mine buys USDT on a P2P exchange and immediately sells it (so, sends money to a stranger’s bank account and then gets paid by another stranger). It could just as well be some e-wallet thing like WebMoney or whatever, but the fact that you can move USDT to your own wallet instead of immediately selling it makes it a bit more reassuring I guess.

I can see the transactions between (eg) my Coinbase and CashApp wallets — BTC actually moves. That’s why all those services can communicate, eg, PayPal and CashApp.

Also, I didn’t say under 10 minutes, but (about) 10 minutes — ie, one block on BTC. (CashApp seems to register with low confirmations.) So your technical reasoning is based on a flawed assumption.