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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Most big US banks charge 40-50$ in fees for international transfers and take a cut of the exchange rate. You might be able to lower this if you use a company like Usforex or Xoom, which I believe take around a 1-1.5% cut of the interbank rate plus a And Bitcoin? I just transferred 1000$ from the US to Europe, from my wellsfargo account, via coinbase (bitcoin USD wallet), kraken (bitcoin EUR wallet) and a EUR bank account there.Coinbase took 10$ in fees for the ACH money transfer from my bank account into the coinbase bitcoin wallet. It took around five days. I think Wellsfargo does not charge for ACH transfers when money is pulled. Kraken requires 6 bitcoin confirmations, so the transfer Coinbase -> Kraken took 20 minutes. The trade bitcoin -> EUR then cost 0.34%, so 3.4 EUR. This fee can possibly be lowered to 0.1% by doing the transfer with a different type of electronic money, like litecoin, I haven't looked into that. The SEPA transfer to the EUR bank account cost EUR 0.09 and took 4 days.Now this is not the whole story, because I haven't figured out the cut the bank takes on the exchange rate and what the difference between the interbank rate and the US->Bitcoin->EUR rates is.In total the bitcoin fees were less than 14 USD for 1000$, the bank transfer cost was at least 50$. The bank exchange rate spread can be around 1.5%, I have no idea what the spread in the case of bitcoin is, but probably lower.The Bitcoin transfer took around 7 days, similar to what it takes to do a Usforex/Xoom transfer. The bitcoin transfer takes a lot more manual clicking work. You have to transfer the money (1-2 minutes), do the bitcoin transfer (+wait 20 minutes), do a bitcoin/euro trade (+ wait 20 minutes), then do the 2nd transfer. Neither coinbase nor kraken can schedule any of this. You also can lose money if you delay any of this, as the exchange rates of bitcoin may change over time. That being said, the volatility of bitcoin at the moment is lower than the banking fees, even over weeks.I think overall I prefer Xoom or Usforex like services for the occasional transfer, as it's so much easier to use. I hope someone automates the whole transfer one day with a program using coinbase's / kraken's APIs.
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