PNC turns USDC into plain old dollars—because apparently stablecoins need a banking plot twist

PNC Bank, the eighth-largest US bank by assets, launched a limited pilot that allows eligible corporate and institutional clients to receive USDC payments through Coinbase. The program accepts USDC, a US dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Circle, on Ethereum using Coinbase Payments products.

Under the pilot, payments are automatically converted into dollars and deposited into designated PNC accounts, enabling businesses to accept stablecoins without holding them. PNC said the service is intended to speed up access to funds and improve cross-border payment efficiency. The bank did not disclose fees, settlement-time benchmarks or the number of participating clients and did not respond to Cointelegraph’s request for additional details by publication time.

The initiative builds on a partnership established in July 2025, when PNC agreed to offer cryptocurrency services through Coinbase’s infrastructure while providing banking services to the exchange. The partnership led to the launch of Bitcoin ($BTC) trading for eligible PNC Private Bank clients in December.

PNC’s move follows a similar initiative by Citi, which expanded its Coinbase partnership in September to enable institutional clients to accept stablecoin payments through its Spring by Citi platform, with Coinbase converting the payments into fiat currency. USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization at $70.5 billion, behind Tether’s USDT at $176.8 billion, according to DefiLlama data. The total stablecoin market stood at around $290.8 billion on Monday.