Bitcoin’s Use in Cross-Border Payments

• Bitcoin has the ability to reduce the costs in the cross-border payments markets.
• Powered by blockchain technology which works as a ledger for all the transactions done on the network, Bitcoin allows sending of cheap and fast transactions across the word.
• Large and small amounts of money can be sent to different users in a few minutes. 
• Once the sender initiates the payments, the transaction is first approved by miners and broadcasted by nodes across the whole network.
• The process can last for a few minutes up to some hours. 
• However, most transactions are processed in 10 minutes and the recipient receives the money.
• The transaction fee for sending a few thousand or hundreds of dollars can be a few cents. 
• Larger transactions that are above $1 million can have a transaction fee of a few dozen dollars. 
• The cryptocurrency Twitter account called Whale Alert stated that on December 20, 2019, a Bitcoin transaction worth $72.21 million incurred a transaction fee of $25.  

Summary of Early Findings

• Our first hour of research determined that programmable money is already been used for cross-border payments. We have provided details for Bitcoin in the early findings.