Coinbase Expands Payments Stack Through Citi Partnership
Citi will provide the bank accounts behind Coinbase's new Virtual Accounts, while Coinbase powers stablecoin acceptance for merchants on Spring by Citi. The deal fills the one layer of Coinbase's payments stack that it's been building out since last year.
Fiodar Yuzhyk
October 02, 2026
Connecting the stacks: On Monday, Coinbase and Citi expanded the partnership they announced in October 2025 with two products. Citi will provide the banking layer behind Coinbase’s new Virtual Accounts, allowing fintechs and other businesses building on Coinbase to offer users virtual USD accounts that automatically convert incoming dollars into stablecoins. In the other direction, Coinbase will power stablecoin acceptance through Spring by Citi, the bank’s merchant payments platform, converting incoming stablecoins into fiat before Citi settles the funds.
Why it matters: Each company gets a capability it does not have in-house. Coinbase gains access to Citi’s banking infrastructure, creating a new route for dollars into USDC. Citi, meanwhile, can offer stablecoin acceptance to its merchant clients without building the conversion infrastructure itself or requiring merchants to hold digital assets.
A payments push: For Coinbase, Citi's banking layer is the latest addition to a payments stack it has been assembling since mid-2025. Over that period, the exchange has added merchant checkout, business accounts, identity checks for platforms' end users, and integrations with payment providers such as Checkout.com and Moov. The buildout reflects how high payments now rank on the company's agenda: in February, Coinbase named scaling stablecoins and payments the second of its three goals for 2026, behind its “everything exchange.”
“We see payments as the next big use case in crypto and believe that the majority of all payments in the economy will eventually run on stablecoin rails,” Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, said on the company’s July 2025 earnings call.
A timeline of Coinbase's stablecoin payments build-out
Following the money: USDC already accounts for a large share of Coinbase's revenue. Under its revenue-sharing agreement with Circle, Coinbase keeps the interest earned on reserves backing USDC held in its products, minus a cut Circle retains as issuer. It also receives half of the remaining reserve income. In the first half of 2026, the arrangement brought in $598 million in revenue, or 23% of Coinbase's total revenue.
Growing the balances: Virtual Accounts give Coinbase a new way to grow that revenue. Coinbase's business clients can now offer branded fiat accounts to their own users, with Citi providing the banking infrastructure underneath. Because incoming dollars are automatically converted into stablecoins, every deposit can add to the balances held in Coinbase products and to the reserve income they generate.
Catching up: The offering also puts Coinbase in direct competition with providers such as Stripe's Bridge and BVNK, which Coinbase tried to buy for about $2 billion before Mastercard acquired it this year. Both already offer similar accounts in several currencies, including euros. Coinbase's current offering, by contrast, supports only dollar deposits from U.S. individuals for now and remains in private beta.
What Citi gains: For Citi, adding stablecoin acceptance through Coinbase expands its offering in a segment the bank wants to grow further. At its May Investor Day, Citi named e-commerce among the verticals where it wants to capture market share, building on an already strong position: according to the bank, it serves 90% of the world’s top e-commerce companies.
Outlook: Both products are still early. Coinbase has not said when Virtual Accounts will leave private beta, or whether they will open to business customers and other currencies. Citi, for its part, has yet to give a launch date for stablecoin acceptance through Spring. The companies' fourth-quarter earnings calls in early 2027 will be the first chance to see whether the partnership shows up in the numbers.
Federico Javin is Global Head of Stablecoins at Jeeves, a stablecoin-powered financial platform for global companies, combining corporate cards, payments, treasury and spend management.
What are businesses actually trying to solve with stablecoin payments?
When a CFO calls us about stablecoins, they rarely ask for another checkout button. They want to fix one of three problems.
First, they want payments that settle in minutes instead of days, including on weekends.
Second, they want to cut FX costs, because every correspondent bank a payment passes through takes a spread and a stablecoin payment skips those hops.
Third, companies in countries with a volatile currency or limited access to dollars need a reliable way to hold dollar value.
How much demand are you seeing today, and where is it emerging most strongly?
We see more businesses ask for stablecoin payments every month. Most of them want to pay with stablecoins, but for a specific group, receiving them is becoming a real requirement: businesses that sell across borders, have customers who already hold USDC or USDT, or operate in markets where getting dollars is difficult.
We see this most clearly in Latin American markets such as Argentina, Colombia and Bolivia, where businesses use stablecoins to access dollar value more quickly and to reduce the friction and FX costs of moving between local currencies and dollars.
By company type, the strongest adopters are cross-border service exporters, software and digital businesses with international clients, marketplaces that pay distributed sellers, and companies with global contractor payrolls. Their transactions are typically mid-sized B2B payments, big enough that wire fees and FX spreads hurt and frequent enough that waiting two days for settlement becomes a real constraint.