Quick Take
- Coinbase is expanding its partnership with Citi to provide businesses with infrastructure connecting traditional fiat payments and stablecoins.
Citi is expanding its partnership with Coinbase to support stablecoin payments for corporate clients. The firms first announced a collaboration in October 2025 focused on fiat-to-crypto payment infrastructure.
Coinbase will use Citi's Virtual Account Wallet to power its Virtual Accounts, allowing customers to accept, hold and pay fiat while automatically converting incoming funds into stablecoins. Separately, Citi's institutional clients will be able to accept stablecoin payments through its Spring by Citi platform, with Coinbase handling the stablecoin payment rails and automatically converting digital assets into fiat for settlement.
The initiatives are launching first in the U.S. and are designed to give businesses bank-account-like functionality while enabling stablecoin payments without requiring merchants to directly hold or manage digital assets.
"Our clients operate in an increasingly fast-paced and complex global economy, and we’re focused on delivering the solutions they need," said Debopama Sen, Citi's head of payments, in Monday's press release. "Our goal is to build the next generation of payments infrastructure – one that is seamless, interoperable, and operates across both traditional and digital payments instruments and networks. This is about enabling the future of commerce, today."
Last year, the U.S. cryptocurrency exchange and tradfi banking giant said they were exploring ways to improve various digital-payment-related initiatives.
"It's not a debate anymore - crypto and stablecoins are the tools that will update the global financial system," Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said at that time. "Excited to be collaborating with Citi to work on improving stablecoin utility and digital asset adoption with their clients."