TL;DR: Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) is expanding its stablecoin payment partnership with Citi (NASDAQ: C), while El Salvador is launching a $2 remittance service using stablecoin settlement on Base, where USDC dominates. Verona has launched verUSD for agentic AI payments, and Morgan Stanley (NASDAQ: MS) is testing stablecoins, tokenization, CBDCs, and DeFi in a segregated digital asset lab.
Key Takeaways:
The Coinbase digital asset exchange is striking stablecoin payment deals at home and abroad, while a new rival for agentic AI stablecoin payments has emerged.
On September 28, Coinbase announced an expansion of the deal it struck last year with U.S. bankers Citi to develop ‘digital asset payment capabilities for institutional clients.’ The new ‘Coinbase Virtual Accounts, powered by Citi’ plan will offer customers “bank-account-like functionality, the ability to accept, hold, and pay funds, with incoming fiat automatically converted into stablecoins.”
The expanded deal will also enable clients of Spring by Citi, the bank’s acceptance platform for merchant acquiring, gateway technology, and settlement, to accept stablecoin payments at checkout without the need to directly hold or manage stablecoins.
Citi’s head of payments & services, Debopama Sen, said the enlarged tie-up with Coinbase was focused on “enabling the future of commerce, today.” Coinbase’s head of infrastructure product, Alec Lovett, said his company’s fintech clients will appreciate the “fast, compliant bridge between fiat and stablecoins” that Citi offers “at scale.”
Coinbase’s chief policy officer, Faryar Shirzad, tweeted that stablecoins are “an opportunity for banks of all sizes to build on their strengths and serve their customers better.” This includes community banks whose “customer relationships are their superpower.”
Earlier this month, Coinbase announced a partnership with payment processor Moov “to bring stablecoin payment acceptance, settlement, and real-time funding to Moov’s growing customer base of more than 1,000 community banks and credit unions.”
The tie-up will allow these financial institutions to add stablecoin options without building their own infrastructure, relying instead on the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) Custodial Wallet to custody funds and its Payments API to move the dollar-backed tokens.
Coinbase claimed its Moov move would allow community banks to “stay relevant with Main Street” rather than “watch more [digital asset activity] happen outside the financial relationships they have spent decades building.”
Coinbase’s head of corporate affairs, Ryan VanGrack, claimed the partnership will allow smaller financial institutions to directly offer stablecoin services to their customers while “preserving what makes them trusted pillars of their communities.” Shirzad claimed stablecoins “can be a great equalizer for American banking.”
Moov’s CEO, Wade Arnold, said that community institutions that implement this technology now will prevent their business customers from having to “go outside their institution to do it.”
The partnership is definitely a strategic one on Coinbase’s part. Community banks’ concerns over mass deposit flight by customers seeking greater returns from stablecoin ‘rewards’ on platforms like Coinbase were one of the key factors in the demise of the Senate’s digital asset market structure bill (the CLARITY Act) earlier this month.
The Moov deal was struck a week before CLARITY stumbled, suggesting it was too little, too late, to move the needle on small banking’s stablecoin concerns.
El Salvador embraces Tether’s rival Circle
You know that meme with the guy turning to appreciate a hot girl walking by while his girlfriend is standing right there looking at him in surprise and disgust? Now imagine the guy is El Salvador, the disrespected girlfriend is Tether, issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin USDT, and the hot girl is Tether’s archrival.
On Tuesday, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced a partnership between his government and Modveon, a California-based ‘verified operating system’ for moving digital money while ensuring the individuals/entities at the transfer endpoints are who they say they are.
The five-year deal centers around the launch of Sivar, the first national deployment of Modveon’s technology. Sivar serves as a portal for Salvadorans to government services, including money transfers both within El Salvador and between the country and America.
Sivar will verify Salvadoran users using their official identity cards, after which they’ll be allowed to transfer money for a flat fee of $2, regardless of the amount. Users of this system don’t need to be crypto-savvy, as the blockchain activity occurs behind the scenes and requires only a debit card to access.
Modveon CEO Nana Murugesan said, “The internet scaled faster than trust … with Sivar, we are building a digital future around trust … Our ambition is for Sivar to evolve into El Salvador’s everyday digital platform and show what becomes possible when trust is built into a country’s digital infrastructure.”
Murugesan is a former Coinbase exec, and the exchange’s venture capital unit is an investor in the company. Coinbase is also Modveon’s payments infrastructure partner, and Sivar’s financial transactions will “settle in a stablecoin on Base,” Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network.
Base’s stablecoin traffic is conducted almost exclusively in USDC, the stablecoin issued by Tether’s rival Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL). It’s unclear whether Tether was ever in the running for this remittance development, but the fact that the deal will benefit Tether’s closest competitor must be a tough pill to swallow, regardless.
Tether has established deep ties to El Salvador, having moved its official headquarters there last year. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino acquired El Salvadoran citizenship, and recent reports indicate Tether’s largest shareholder, Giancarlo Devasini, acquired his own Salvadoran passport this year.
At the time of the HQ transfer, Tether made vague commitments about building a $100 million ‘Tether Tower’ skyscraper in the country’s capital, San Salvador, but nothing’s been heard of this project since. Perhaps Ardoino and Devasini should be checking local real estate news to make sure a new ‘Base Building’ isn’t in the works.
Modveon’s direct government tie-up is with AAB, El Salvador’s Bitcoin Fund Management Agency, which was originally established to handle the government’s BTC tokens. El Salvador declared BTC to be legal tender in 2021, but ultimately binned this law after residents and merchants found transacting in BTC impractical and unworkable.
According to El Salvador’s Central Reserve Bank, digital assets accounted for just $41 million in remittances to the country in the first half of 2026, representing well below 1% of the over $5 billion sent home by ex-pats during that span. Around 92% of Salvadoran-bound remittances come from the U.S.
Verona makes bid for agentic AI stablecoin payments
USDC currently dominates the market for stablecoin-based agentic AI (artificial intelligence) payments, and Circle expects to increase that dominance via the recent public mainnet launch of its layer-1 Arc network, but that doesn’t mean rivals aren’t trying to catch up. Tether has its USDT-focused agentic-friendly Stable ‘stablechain,’ payment processor Stripe has its stablecoin-focused Tempo network, and there’s no shortage of protocols aimed at boosting stablecoin usage in machine-to-machine payments.
The newest member of this club is verUSD, a dollar-backed token launched this week by Verona, ‘the intelligence layer for AI’ formerly known as XION. Issued by stablecoin infrastructure firm Brale, verUSD will be available natively on the Arbitum, Avalanche, Celo, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and Solana networks, and Verona says additional network integrations are coming shortly.
Verona previously settled payments in USDC, but the company is promising a “quick and simple” transition to verUSD for the companies building on Verona’s infrastructure. Verona, which describes itself as “a network and layer” rather than simply “another chain,” claims to have handled “over 70 million verified interactions across 5+ million users.”
Verona relies on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) to make user-verified data “portable, private, and programmable, so any agent can transact on information the user actually owns … every verified fact becomes a reusable asset the user controls,” allowing agents to “verify once, reuse everywhere, expose nothing.”
Verona says it’s secured “more than $100 million in commitments” from a variety of venture capital groups, including Animoca Ventures and Figment Capital. Of this sum, $60 million is “signed, committed revenue” in the form of payments, representing contracted volume, while the rest of the funds are capital commitments from Verona’s partners.
Morgan Stanley taking a ‘trust, but verify’ crypto approach
In July 2025, following President Trump’s signing the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act into law, Morgan Stanley (NASDAQ: MS) CFO Sharon Yeshaya said her company was “actively discussing” dipping its toes into this pool. But she cautioned that it was “a little early to tell” how eagerly the bank’s clients might embrace stablecoin tech.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Morgan Stanley had launched a ‘Digital Asset Lab’ to explore how to integrate various blockchain-based technologies into its existing product line. This includes stablecoins, tokenization of deposits and money market funds, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
The new lab will be run by Megan Brewer, Morgan Stanley’s market innovation and labs lead, and is intended to provide a walled-off space in which to tinker without any threat to the bank’s core systems. The bank’s digital asset team is led by Amy Oldenburg, who called the lab “a secure, compliant and segregated environment to be able to test and explore some of these new areas of digital assets.”
Oldenburg expressed interest in exploring DeFi vaults, into which investors deposit digital assets (such as stablecoins) that are then put to work in activities like staking. Oldenburg said, “There is a very reasonable path to see vaults being part of the future … but we need to understand how that technology works” without putting the rest of Morgan Stanley’s operations at risk.
FAQs:
What is Coinbase’s new stablecoin deal with Citi?
Coinbase and Citi expanded their partnership to provide institutional clients with digital asset payment capabilities. Coinbase Virtual Accounts, powered by Citi, will provide bank-account-like functionality for accepting, holding, and paying funds, while incoming fiat can be automatically converted into stablecoins. Citi’s Spring platform will also support stablecoin payments at checkout without merchants directly managing the tokens.
How will El Salvador use stablecoins for remittances?
El Salvador is launching Sivar, a digital platform that allows verified users to transfer money for a flat $2 fee regardless of the amount.
How big are digital asset remittances in El Salvador?
According to El Salvador’s Central Reserve Bank, digital assets accounted for $41 million in remittances during the first half of 2026.
What is Verona’s verUSD stablecoin?
verUSD is a dollar-backed stablecoin launched by Verona for payments involving AI agents.
Why is verUSD designed for AI agents?
Verona positions verUSD as the infrastructure for agentic AI payments, enabling software agents to transact using verified user information. The platform uses zero-knowledge proofs to make verified data portable, private, and programmable, allowing agents to verify information once and reuse it without exposing unnecessary user data.
What is Morgan Stanley’s Digital Asset Lab?
Morgan Stanley’s Digital Asset Lab is a segregated environment for testing blockchain-based technologies without exposing the bank’s core systems. The lab will explore stablecoins, tokenized deposits and money market funds, CBDCs, and DeFi.
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