Citi clients can accept stablecoins without ever touching crypto
Citigroup and Coinbase have announced an automated service that converts stablecoins such as USDC into dollars and back again for institutional clients, launched in the United States.
The arrangement runs both ways. A Citi business client that receives a stablecoin payment never holds the token: Coinbase converts it into dollars behind the scenes, and Citi books the deposit like any other payment. Companies building on Coinbase can open accounts that behave like ordinary bank accounts, powered by Citi’s banking software, with incoming dollars automatically turned into stablecoins.
The service targets businesses and large organisations rather than retail users. Coinbase has said more than 150 million people worldwide hold stablecoins, a client base a bank can now invoice without joining the crypto world; that figure is the company’s own and has not been independently verified.
Goldman follows in the same week
Goldman Sachs has reportedly opened its $100 billion Treasury fund to crypto firms through the Lynq settlement network, without tokenising the fund.
Two of the largest US banks plugging crypto firms into legacy rails in the same week points to stablecoin volumes becoming large enough that banks would rather process them than lose them, and it puts stablecoin settlement one step closer to ordinary banking infrastructure. Details of the Citi service remain thin: neither Citigroup nor Coinbase has published its own announcement, so which stablecoins it supports and which clients use it are not confirmed.
For FX traders the practical shift is that stablecoin inflows and outflows for US institutions will increasingly land as plain dollar deposits, blurring the line between crypto settlement and banking liquidity.
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Saqib Iqbal
