Marriage of convenience on Wall Street: Citigroup partners with Coinbase for digital asset payments

Marriage of convenience on Wall Street. Citigroup is partnering with Coinbase to add digital asset payments to its offering for large accounts. The first phase covers entries and exits in fiat currency as well as the orchestration of flows, two building blocks that the bank intends to connect to a network of more than 300 clearing systems spread across 94 markets.

Key Points

Citigroup opens digital asset payments backed by Coinbase infrastructure to its professional clients

The first project concerns dollar-crypto conversions and flow management, before payments in stablecoins

The bank has operated its own internal channel since 2023 and has not ruled out the issuance of its token

The central scenario of the Citi Institute places the outstanding amount of stablecoins around 1,600 billion dollars by 2030

Citi and Coinbase plug fiat-crypto ramps first

Concretely, the two groups attack through the most banal point of friction: the conversion between dollars and digital assets. The entry and exit ramps in fiat currency (which it should be remembered that they concentrate most of the costs and delays for a corporate treasurer) will remain managed by Citi, with the Coinbase infrastructure underneath. The orchestration of payments and alternative payment methods between fiat currency and stablecoins are also on the agenda.

Citi’s contribution lies in its network. The bank claims nearly $5,000 billion in flows processed every day on behalf of multinationals and financial institutions, with payment approvals in around a hundred jurisdictions.

Coinbase brings reverse plumbing. The exchange holds bitcoins from the majority of American spot ETFs and operates Coinbase Prime for professional managers. Its merchant payments offering backed by USDC has been running on Base since 2025. For a financial director, the promise concerns permanent settlement. A stablecoin transfer settles on a Sunday evening like a Tuesday morning, where a traditional corresponding payment waits for the local systems to open.

From Citi Token Services to the in-house stablecoin

However, Citi is not discovering blockchain with this contract. Since 2023, Citi Token Services has converted customer deposits into tokens to move liquidity between its subsidiaries 24 hours a day, on a private chain reserved for its own networks. A pilot conducted with the shipowner Maersk was used to automate bank guarantees in maritime transport.

During the presentation of the quarterly results for July 2025, the group's management went even further:

“We are looking into issuing a Citi stablecoin, but arguably the biggest is the tokenized deposit space, where we are very active. »

Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup – Source: Reuters

The Citi Institute projects a capitalization of stablecoins at $1.6 trillion in 2030 in its central scenario and $3.7 trillion in its high scenario. Promulgated in July 2025, the GENIUS Act provided these tokens with an American federal framework and removed the legal uncertainty that was holding back banking management.