So why can a traditional bank not solve this?

In Europe you can wire money across borders for free, you just need to know the account number. Arrives in seconds at 0 cost.

I feel like a lot of the fintech in the US is purely a result of a lack of regulation.

For the example of Argentina, the real reason that business is using crypto is because their currency is unreliable. It might be a good fit there but trading in dollars would've fixed that too.

I’m as cynical about crypto as any sane person but I think you’re hand-waving away the challenges of international business. How can you transact in dollars if you’re a business in Argentina? As you say, if you’re operating in Europe, this is a solved problem, but lots of businesses are operating across borders that don’t have the same payment options. Banks could solve this problem but they haven’t and this is what non-banks have come up with. I’m sure if SEPA was global this wouldn’t be necessary, but it isn’t.

Australia too has instant and fee free transfers, so American staples like venmo just simply don’t exist here. People just send money to and from each other’s banks directly instantly and for free. So why would we need another service?

Crypto here would similarly make very little sense.

> It might be a good fit there but trading in dollars would've fixed that too.

You are underestimating how toxic the Argentinian government was.

We did do that with capital controls, the problem is that it was illegal, and the Argentinian IRS is very active trying to tear you a new one. Argentina has long become a bimonetary economy, dealing with ARS for everyday transactions, but saving in USD and pricing assets in USD (real state for example).

To give an example where this would have helped, my parents in Argentina needed to send money to my brother in Europe. The government had made that illegal with capital controls, so I had to transfer him money through wise from a 3rd country and when at some point later I visited they gave me the cash.

People underestimate how annoying and distopic governments can be if given the chance.

That is because the EU acts as a coordinating authority, if you wanted to transfer money from Greece to Iran it would be a different issue.

I suspect that banks cannot solve this because it would be illegal for them to do so.

If many banks could send and receive money from across the world money laundering would become way way easier (in this sense the lack of privacy in many blockchains can be seen as a strength) and it is how offshore fiscal paradises work

>in Europe you can wire money across borders for free

do you mean "electronic funds transfer"? because "wiring" is an old school thing that uses Telex machines and and gets processed by people and I would doubt it carries no fee. (It's probably been modernised so that people handle virtual slips of paper, but it very much carries the feel of an "order on a slip of paper" type of transaction and is far from instantaneous.)

I'm genuinely asking, I only know about the US systems where electronic funds transfer is known as ACH which is an automated clearing house, and wiring is called wiring. From the US, I can wire to European banks. I can't ACH.

I think the argentinian case was mentioned for marketing purposes. You can trade using the USD dollar which at the end of the day is probably what your client/provider is using anyway.