Coinbase is partnering with financial services provider Moov to give community banks and credit unions access to stablecoin payment capabilities, seeking to bring crypto-based acceptance, settlement, and real-time funding into the traditional banking system just days before a pivotal U.S. Senate vote on cryptocurrency legislation.
Under the partnership, Coinbase will provide the digital-asset infrastructure while Moov will connect it to payment systems already used by financial institutions and their customers. The arrangement is designed to allow community banks and credit unions to offer stablecoin services without requiring businesses to leave their primary financial institution to access them.
The partnership, shared exclusively with CNBC, comes ahead of a preliminary Senate vote next Tuesday on the Clarity Act, legislation that would establish a broad regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.
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The timing is significant because community banks have been among the financial sector’s most vocal opponents of parts of the crypto industry’s policy agenda. Banks have raised concerns about interest-like rewards offered by crypto exchanges, warning that such products could encourage customers to shift deposits away from traditional institutions.
Coinbase and other crypto companies have pushed Congress to advance the Clarity Act. The Moov partnership offers a potential way to address one of the industry’s central challenges: bringing crypto services into regulated financial institutions rather than allowing digital-asset activity to pull customers and payments away from them.
Moov already serves more than 1,000 community banks and credit unions across the U.S., according to the companies. Its infrastructure connects financial institutions to services including card acquiring and issuing and real-time payment rails.
“Community banks and credit unions have witnessed their customers use digital assets for years,” Ryan VanGrack, vice chair and head of corporate affairs at Coinbase, said in a statement. “Through our partnership with Moov, Coinbase is delivering the regulated infrastructure they need to offer these services directly — embedded right into their existing systems.”
The companies are initially targeting businesses that increasingly encounter stablecoins as a payment method. Wade Arnold, Moov’s co-founder and CEO, said business customers of community financial institutions are already being asked to accept stablecoins but often have to turn to outside providers to do so.
“Business customers of community institutions are already being asked to accept stablecoins, and today they go outside their institution to do it,” Arnold said.
“We built this so the answer comes from their primary FI instead. Merchants need acceptance and disbursement now. What comes next is bigger: funding that doesn’t stop for weekends or holidays, because the rail doesn’t close. Institutions that add this now will be positioned for both,” he said.
That matters for stablecoins because their potential value to financial institutions extends beyond cryptocurrency trading. Stablecoins can function as payment and settlement instruments, allowing money to move at any time rather than being constrained by traditional banking hours and payment-system schedules.
For community banks, the opportunity is to retain customers and transaction flows that might otherwise migrate to fintech companies or crypto platforms. Instead of treating stablecoins solely as a competitive threat, banks could incorporate them into their existing payments businesses.
Citizens Bank of Edmond in Oklahoma, one of Moov’s customers, is among the institutions that could benefit from such capabilities. Jill Castilla, the bank’s chairman, president and CEO, said its small-business customers are looking for ways to reduce interchange costs and receive payments faster.
Therefore, the partnership positions stablecoins as a potential banking infrastructure product rather than simply a cryptocurrency feature. That expands the addressable market beyond crypto-native businesses and consumers for Coinbase, while for Moov and its financial-institution customers, it provides a way to respond to demand for new payment rails while keeping the relationship with the bank.
The political environment surrounding the partnership remains uncertain.
The Clarity Act needs at least 60 votes in the Senate to advance, and its prospects remain unclear. Democrats have raised concerns about ethics provisions in the legislation, arguing that the proposed language does not go far enough to prevent public officials from benefiting from crypto-related activities.
Some Republicans, meanwhile, remain concerned about the bill’s potential effects on community banks. The opposition has created a difficult balancing act for the crypto industry. Coinbase wants clearer rules that could encourage institutional adoption, but traditional financial institutions remain concerned that some crypto products could compete directly with their deposit base and payments businesses.
The Moov agreement addresses that tension from a different direction. If banks can offer stablecoin acceptance and settlement themselves, the technology could become an additional service rather than a mechanism for customers to bypass banks entirely.
The broader commercial concern is whether stablecoins can move from being primarily a crypto-market infrastructure tool into a mainstream payments technology. Partnerships with established financial-services providers could be an important step because community banks and credit unions already have relationships with millions of consumers and small businesses.
For Coinbase, access to Moov’s network of more than 1,000 institutions provides a potential distribution channel into a part of the financial system that has historically been more difficult for crypto companies to reach.
The Senate vote will determine whether the industry’s regulatory push takes another step forward, but the Coinbase-Moov partnership points to a parallel development that may prove just as important over time: crypto companies are increasingly trying to make digital assets work inside the banking system rather than outside it.