Citi and Coinbase Expand Partnership to Enable Stablecoin Payments for Institutional Clients
Key Takeaways
- •Citigroup and Coinbase have expanded their partnership, first announced in 2025, to allow Citi's institutional clients to receive, hold, and pay in stablecoins.
- •Merchants using Citi's payment platform will accept stablecoins at checkout through Coinbase's payment infrastructure, with Coinbase converting the digital assets into fiat while Citi settles the funds as the bank of record.
- •The structure enables businesses to accept stablecoin payments without directly holding or managing digital assets, keeping treasury and reconciliation within familiar banking systems.
- •Coinbase will use Citi's Virtual Account Wallet to power its Virtual Accounts, giving business customers bank-account-like functionality for fiat with incoming funds automatically converted into stablecoins.
- •The new services will roll out first in the United States, where the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established the first federal framework for payment stablecoins.
Citigroup and Coinbase have expanded their partnership to allow Citi's institutional clients to receive, hold, and pay in stablecoins, a step that brings digital-asset settlement closer to the workings of conventional corporate banking. The expansion lands as stablecoins—digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies such as the US dollar—move beyond crypto trading and into mainstream payment infrastructure, drawing in banks that sit at the center of corporate money flows.
Under the arrangement, merchants using Citi's payment platform will be able to accept stablecoins at checkout through Coinbase's payment infrastructure. Coinbase will convert the digital assets into fiat currency, while Citi will settle the funds in its capacity as the bank of record. The structure is designed to let businesses accept stablecoin payments without having to directly hold or manage digital assets on their own. For merchants, that split matters: the checkout can run on stablecoin rails while the money that reaches their books is ordinary fiat, keeping treasury and reconciliation inside familiar banking systems.
The partnership also operates in the opposite direction. Coinbase will use Citi's Virtual Account Wallet to power its Virtual Accounts, giving business customers bank-account-like functionality for receiving, holding, and paying in fiat, with incoming funds automatically converted into stablecoins.
According to the companies, the new services will roll out first in the United States, making that market the first place the conversion-and-settlement model operates in production.
The expanded partnership, which the two companies first announced in 2025, underscores a growing industry effort to connect stablecoin payment rails with existing banking infrastructure, rather than requiring companies to build separate crypto systems to handle digital-asset payments. The regulatory backdrop has shifted as well: the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established the first federal framework for payment stablecoins in the United States, the market where this rollout begins. Citi has said the objective is to develop payment infrastructure that operates across both traditional and digital payment networks.
