This is especially important for remittances (e.g. money sent by migrant workers home to their families). Migrant workers receive little pay, are often unbanked, and really need to stretch every penny of income in order to get the most money to their loved ones back home (where this money is needed for bills, groceries, education, and other necessities). Getting charged $40 on a $500 money transfer is thus a huge pain-point for them, as is for their family having to wait upwards of a week to receive the money. Meanwhile, moving a digital asset like bitcoin takes a couple of hours and costs pennies.
This is possible precisely because of how blockchain technology and the distributed ledger work. All the processed transactions of a specific cryptocurrency in a certain time period are recorded into the most current block attached to all previous blocks of that cryptocurrency in a chain (hence, blockchain). Everyone who has even the smallest fraction of this cryptocurrency has a record of the entire chain. This is why it’s called a distributed ledger — everyone owning a piece of the cryptocurrency has the full ledger of all transactions that ever happened on the blockchain for that cryptocurrency. Creating a fake transaction is practically impossible because everyone else would still have the correct copy of all transactions and would thus quickly sniff out the scammer. Knowing this, exchanges allow for quick movement of cryptocurrencies from one account to another, anywhere in the world. It is so cheap because no intermediaries are needed — the network of that cryptocurrency and the mathematical formulas by which the currency abides provide security against fraud.