The problem with traditional cross-border transfers
If you've ever sent money internationally through a bank, you already know the drill: you initiate a wire, and then you wait. A SWIFT transfer typically takes anywhere from one to five business days to arrive, and that's assuming nothing gets flagged for extra review along the way. During that window, your money isn't really sitting still — it's being handed off across a chain of correspondent banks, and each hop in that chain can take its own cut.
By the time a wire lands, it's often been touched by the sending bank, one or more correspondent banks, the receiving bank, and an FX conversion with its own spread baked in — none of which is disclosed clearly upfront. Add it up and a "simple" transfer can lose a meaningful chunk of value before the recipient ever sees it.
Services like Western Union or Wise improve on the pure bank-wire experience, but they still generally require a local bank account on one or both ends, or a trip to a physical agent location to pick up cash. That works fine if you live a conventional, single-country life. It works much less well if you're an entrepreneur juggling clients in three currencies, or a digital nomad who doesn't hold a stable local bank account in every country you pass through.
What a dollar-backed stablecoin changes
A stablecoin is a digital token designed to hold a steady value, usually pegged 1:1 to a currency like the US dollar. USDC is the most widely used example: every USDC in circulation is backed by a dollar (or dollar-equivalent asset) held in reserve, so one USDC is meant to always be redeemable for one US dollar.
What makes USDC useful for cross-border payments isn't the "digital dollar" idea on its own — it's where it lives. USDC moves on public blockchains, which means it isn't routed through a chain of correspondent banks at all. It moves directly from one wallet to another, settling in seconds, for a small network fee, to anyone with a compatible wallet, anywhere in the world, at any hour. There's no business-hours cutoff, no holiday delay, and no intermediary bank quietly taking a spread in the middle.
How sending works on FAX
Sending USDC internationally through FAX is deliberately simple. You need a FAX wallet (or any compatible wallet address), and so does your recipient — though it doesn't have to be FAX specifically, since USDC works with any wallet on the same chain.
From there:
- Pick the chain. FAX supports USDC across Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Solana, all under one unified balance in the app — you don't need to think about which chain your USDC happens to be sitting on before you send.
- Enter the recipient's address and amount. Review it, then confirm.
- Send. The transfer settles on-chain in seconds.
One detail that trips people up the first time they use crypto: on most chains, moving a token requires paying a separate network fee in that chain's native gas token (ETH, MATIC, SOL, and so on). FAX sponsors gas, so you don't need to separately go acquire and hold a network's gas token just to move your USDC — you send from your USDC balance, full stop.
A SWIFT wire can take one to five business days to arrive, longer if it gets held for review, and it doesn't move at all outside business hours. A USDC transfer settles in seconds, any day, any time. FAX charges no monthly account fees, and any fee involved in a transaction is always shown upfront, before you confirm — no surprise deduction after the money has already moved.
"The last mile": getting local currency to the recipient
Sending USDC solves the cross-border leg of the problem — the part that used to take days and multiple intermediaries now takes seconds. But it doesn't automatically solve everything. Your recipient often ultimately wants local currency landing in their own bank account or mobile wallet, not a stablecoin balance they have to figure out what to do with.
This "last mile" — stablecoin to local currency — is where FAX is building out direct rails, country by country. The one that's live and concrete today is Brazil: FAX lets you pay any Pix key or QR code directly from your USDC balance, and the recipient receives Brazilian reais in their bank account instantly, with no crypto wallet required on their end. Read how paying a Pix key directly from USDC works.
On the sending side, if you're starting from a US bank account rather than an existing crypto balance, FAX also supports funding your wallet with USDC via an ACH bank transfer. See how buying USDC with a US bank transfer works. Coverage for local cash-out rails beyond Brazil, and funding rails beyond US ACH, is expanding — check the app for what's currently available for a given country before you rely on it.
Receiving works the same way, in reverse
The other half of cross-border money movement is receiving it — and FAX is built as a multi-chain wallet from the ground up, so you're not stuck managing a separate address for every network. Whether you want a dedicated deposit address per chain or a smart deposit flow that accepts a range of tokens and chains and lands everything as USDC, here's how FAX's multi-chain deposit and receive flow works.
Send your first international USDC transfer
Open FAX, fund your balance, and send anywhere in seconds.