Businesses that process payments through Citigroup will be able to accept stablecoins from their customers and receive ordinary dollars in return, under an expanded partnership with Coinbase announced on Monday.
The feature sits inside Spring by Citi, the bank’s platform for merchant acquiring, gateway services and settlement. When a buyer pays in stablecoins, Coinbase’s payments infrastructure swaps the tokens for fiat, and Citi, as the bank of record, credits the merchant. The merchant never touches the crypto.
The arrangement runs in the other direction too. Coinbase has chosen Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet, which the bank sells through its banking-as-a-service business, as the banking layer behind Coinbase Virtual Accounts, where incoming fiat is converted into stablecoins automatically.
Both launch in the US first. The companies say the setup opens merchants to more than 150 million people worldwide who hold stablecoins.
Debopama Sen, Citi’s head of payments, described the goal as building the next generation of payments infrastructure, while Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong said crypto and stablecoins are the tools that will update the financial system. The two first worked together in October 2025, on fiat-to-crypto payments.
What neither side disclosed is the detail a merchant would need. There is no word on which stablecoins or blockchains are supported, what the conversion costs, or how much volume either company expects to run through it.
The 150 million figure counts people who hold stablecoins, not people who want to spend them at a corporate checkout. It is the second number that decides whether this is a payments product or a press release.
