Citigroup Lets Merchants Accept Stablecoins via Coinbase

Citigroup and Coinbase have deepened their partnership, allowing Citi's institutional merchants to accept stablecoin payments through Coinbase's infrastructure.

This means that when a customer pays with a stablecoin like COIN, the transaction is converted into fiat currency by Coinbase before being settled as the bank of record by Citi.

The collaboration also enables Coinbase to use Citi's Virtual Account Wallet to power its own virtual accounts, giving customers bank-account-like functionality to accept, hold and send funds with automatic conversion from fiat to stablecoins.

Citigroup's payment acceptance platform, Spring by Citi, now supports stablecoin payments through Coinbase, reaching a market of over 150 million stablecoin holders worldwide, according to Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional.