Citi, Coinbase Team Up on Stablecoin Infrastructure

Citi and Coinbase are teaming up to build stablecoin infrastructure for businesses, allowing clients to move between regular money and stablecoins without needing separate systems.

The partnership comes as banks worldwide use blockchain technology to speed up processes and cater to crypto-hungry customers. Citi has a number of blockchain offerings, including Citi Token Services, which enables real-time cross-border payments using tokenized deposits.

The two companies will provide bank-account-like features to Coinbase's payments customers through the Coinbase Virtual Accounts built on Citi's banking-as-a-service platform. This feature will enable automatic conversion of incoming fiat to stablecoins.

Citi's merchant platform, Spring by Citi, will use Coinbase's infrastructure so that Citi's enterprise clients can accept stablecoin payments at checkout. Coinbase will convert the stablecoins to fiat, and Citi settles the funds, eliminating the need for merchants to hold or manage crypto directly.