Banking Giant Citi Taps Coinbase to Turn Stablecoins Into Cash

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Key Takeaways

A Wall Street Giant Hands Coinbase the Crypto Plumbing

A corporate customer pays in stablecoins: Coinbase handles the blockchain transaction, Citi turns the incoming tokens into ordinary money, and the merchant gets paid through its bank. That’s the arrangement the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) disclosed on Monday, Sept. 28, in an exclusive report, bringing America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange into one of the world’s biggest banking operations.

The twist is that Citi and Coinbase spent much of 2026 on opposite sides of Washington’s stablecoin rewards fight. Now they’re working together to put digital dollars through the corporate payments machinery.

Coinbase Gets the Blockchain, Citi Keeps the Banking

Citi first revealed its partnership with Coinbase in October 2025. This particular arrangement puts Coinbase in charge of the public blockchain infrastructure while Citi handles merchant acquisition, conventional currency conversion and bank settlement. Corporate customers can accept stablecoin payments without managing their own crypto wallets as incoming tokens convert automatically into fiat currency, leaving Citi to handle the banking side.

The arrangement also works in reverse. Coinbase Payments customers can access bank-style account services to receive, hold and distribute funds, with the option to convert cash into stablecoins held at Coinbase. Back when the two companies first took the wraps off their collaboration in October 2025, they outlined plans for fiat on-ramps, off-ramps and alternative stablecoin payout methods. Monday’s WSJ report puts considerably more meat on those bones.

Citi Already Moves $1 Billion a Day in Tokenized Deposits

Citi isn’t starting from scratch. Its Token Services platform, operational since 2024, lets corporate customers move tokenized bank deposits between Citi branches around the clock. The operation handles roughly $1 billion daily, compared with approximately $6 trillion moving through Citi’s broader payments business.

Alongside this, Citi’s existing tokenized deposits operate on a private, permissioned ledger. However, they don’t automatically accept USDC arriving from somebody’s public blockchain wallet. That’s where Coinbase comes in. The exchange supplies the public blockchain connection, while Citi brings an established banking operation spanning 94 markets and more than 300 payment networks.

Meanwhile, Citi is expanding tokenized bank transfers toward Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Its digital-asset ambitions also extend to native cryptocurrency custody, beginning with bitcoin, through its Custody+ offering.

Washington’s Stablecoin Fight Hasn’t Stopped the Deal

The pairing carries a rather curious political contradiction. Coinbase and banking interests have clashed over stablecoin rewards, particularly during negotiations surrounding the stalled Clarity Act. Banks have argued that cryptocurrency rewards resemble deposit interest without equivalent banking requirements. Coinbase has pushed back against restrictions it considers anticompetitive.

Nevertheless, Citi is pressing ahead with Coinbase. The financial incentive is substantial. Citi Research’s Stablecoins 2030 forecast places its base-case stablecoin issuance estimate at $1.9 trillion by 2030, with a $4 trillion bull case. At higher transaction velocities, its base scenario translates into approximately $100 trillion in annual stablecoin turnover. That’s a tidy sum, even by Wall Street standards.

Several commercial details remain undisclosed, including the launch date, participating corporate clients, and supported stablecoins. Coinbase currently advertises USDC rewards of approximately 3.75% annually, but that isn’t a Citi deposit rate. For all the legislative wrangling over stablecoin rewards, a major American bank is preparing to let a cryptocurrency exchange handle the blockchain side of corporate payments while keeping the banking business for itself.