Low Cost Decentralized Payments: What It Actually Takes in Practice

The promise of moving money for cents, without intermediaries and in seconds, has been on the table for years. The reality is that very few rails deliver it at institutional scale. Between network fees, on and off ramp costs, stablecoin spreads and compliance overhead, the real cost of a decentralized payment is usually far from the headline figure. In this panel, payments infrastructure operators, stablecoin issuers and banks already processing real volume put the numbers on the table: where the cost actually accumulates, which network and asset combinations work today for B2B payments and remittances, and what still needs to happen for crypto rails to be systematically cheaper than the banking system.