In brief
- Citi and Coinbase announced on 28 September 2026 that Citi’s institutional merchants can accept stablecoin payments at checkout through Spring by Citi, with Coinbase converting the tokens to fiat.
- In the other direction, Coinbase Virtual Accounts now run on Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet, turning incoming fiat into stablecoins automatically.
- Both services launch first in the United States. Neither company named which stablecoins are supported or gave pricing.
Citigroup and Coinbase have widened a partnership they first announced in October 2025, this time with two live payment products. According to Citi’s press release of 28 September 2026, the deal lets businesses move between bank money and stablecoins without building or running separate crypto systems.
The first piece is merchant acceptance. Spring by Citi, the bank’s payment acceptance platform, will let its institutional clients take stablecoins at checkout. Coinbase Payments handles the stablecoin side and converts the tokens into fiat, and Citi settles the funds as the bank of record. The merchant never holds or custodies the digital assets. The companies say this opens those merchants to more than 150 million stablecoin holders worldwide.
The second piece runs the other way. Coinbase picked Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet, part of Citi Services’ banking-as-a-service business, to power Coinbase Virtual Accounts. These give Coinbase’s payments customers something close to a bank account: they can accept, hold and send funds, and incoming fiat is converted into stablecoins automatically. Citi calls that automatic conversion an industry first.
What the two companies said
“Our goal is to build the next generation of payments infrastructure that our clients need,” said Ashish Bajaj, head of Services for North America at Citi. Coinbase’s head of infrastructure product, Alec Lovett, said fintechs building on Coinbase “have always needed a fast, compliant bridge between fiat and stablecoins, and Citi gives us that at scale.” Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, called Citi “exactly the kind of regulated banking partner the digital asset economy needs.”
The release does not list the stablecoins covered, the fees, or a date for markets outside the US. Both companies say more features will follow in the coming months.
Why a bank of Citi’s size matters here
Citi says it moves about $6 trillion a day and banks 90% of the top e-commerce companies and 15 of the world’s 20 largest fintechs. Its existing digital-asset work includes Citi Token Services, which uses tokenized deposits for round-the-clock cross-border dollar payments, and a plan announced in August to add bitcoin custody, as Bitcoin Magazine noted. Decrypt points out that the original October 2025 tie-up covered fiat pay-ins and payouts for Citi’s clients; this expansion adds checkout acceptance on top.
For merchants, the model keeps crypto off the balance sheet: the customer pays in a stablecoin and the business receives dollars from its own bank. That is the kind of use case behind forecasts that stablecoins could reach 4% of global payments by 2030. It also arrives as US regulators write the rules for dollar stablecoin issuers, a process our explainer on why Washington regulates stablecoins covers in more detail.
