Closing Out September: Puffer And Anchorage Ink A Key Collaboration
This week’s deals share a theme: making the line between fiat and crypto disappear entirely. Citi auto-converts incoming cash into stablecoins, NYSE pipes tokenized stocks straight into Blockchain.com’s 44 million users, and Anchorage sets up custody before Puffer UniFi even launches. Infrastructure first, announcement second.
Citi and Coinbase Expand Their Partnership to Bridge Fiat and Stablecoin Payments
Citi and Coinbase have expanded their collaboration with two initiatives aimed at letting clients move between fiat and stablecoins without building that bridge themselves.
The first is Coinbase Virtual Accounts, built on Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet solution, which gives Coinbase’s payments customers bank-account-like functionality: accepting, holding and paying funds, with incoming fiat automatically converted into stablecoins, something the companies are calling an industry first.
The second piece runs the other direction: Citi will let its institutional clients accept stablecoin payments at checkout through Spring by Citi, its payment acceptance platform, powered by Coinbase Payments.
Digital currency gets converted to fiat automatically, with Citi settling as the bank of record, meaning a merchant can serve the roughly 150 million stablecoin holders globally without ever having to custody digital assets themselves.
Alec Lovett, Coinbase’s head of infrastructure product, said businesses building on Coinbase have long needed “a fast, compliant bridge between fiat and stablecoins,” and argued Citi gives them that at real scale.
Ashish Bajaj, who heads Citi’s North America services business, framed the goal as building payments infrastructure that works seamlessly “across both traditional and digital payment instruments,” calling it less a future ambition than something already happening now.
The initiatives launch first in the US, with Citi, a bank moving roughly $6 trillion daily, already running 24/7 USD clearing and Citi Token Services alongside this expansion.
The Block Partners With The Hill to Launch the Capitol Crypto Forum
The Block has partnered with The Hill to launch Capitol Crypto Forum, a new event series designed to put Washington policymakers in the same room as the people actually building and investing in digital assets.
The pairing makes sense on paper. The Hill has covered federal policy for decades, while The Block is deeply embedded in crypto and blockchain technology specifically.
The series debuts November 19 in Washington, D.C., with a half-day, invitation-only session called Capitol Crypto Forum: First Look, timed deliberately to land just after the 2026 midterm elections, when a new Congress is taking shape and policy priorities are likely to be actively shifting.
The agenda spans keynote conversations and smaller roundtables covering digital asset market structure, stablecoins, tokenization and the broader role blockchain technology is playing in financial innovation.
Steve Chung, The Block’s CEO, said the decisions being made in Washington will have “a profound impact” on where the industry goes next, arguing there’s real value in getting policymakers and industry builders into the same room rather than talking past each other through press releases and testimony.
The timing reflects a broader reality. Crypto regulation increasingly intersects with larger debates over capital markets, AI, national security and US competitiveness, rather than existing as a standalone policy silo.
MoonPay Launches MoonPay Korea With Partnerships Across Three Major Banks
MoonPay has launched MoonPay Korea as its strategic hub for Asia-Pacific expansion, backed by simultaneous partnerships with three of South Korea’s largest financial institutions: KakaoBank, Woori Bank and KB Financial Group.
Each relationship targets a slightly different problem. With KakaoBank, the focus is a blockchain-based cross-border payment model aimed specifically at international students, with a joint proof-of-concept targeting overseas remittances completed in under an hour, a dramatic cut from the days conventional transfers can take.
The Woori Bank partnership centers on building international distribution for a KRW-pegged stablecoin, including a global wallet letting overseas Koreans and tourists purchase and convert the token, plus a one-stop service bundling account opening, identity verification and currency conversion for foreign residents.
KB Financial Group’s piece is broader still, exploring on- and off-ramps, wallets and stablecoin issuance for both institutional and individual clients.
All three tie into South Korea’s proposed National Asset Basic Act, which signals a real shift in how the country plans to treat digital assets going forward.
MoonPay Korea is meant to function as a pilot market first, refining these services domestically before any of it scales out across the rest of Asia-Pacific.
Whether this bank-led stablecoin model travels well to other markets is really the open question the industry will be watching.
NYSE Partners With Blockchain.com to Distribute Tokenized Stocks
The New York Stock Exchange is partnering with Blockchain.com to make tokenized equities and ETFs available to Blockchain.com’s roughly 44 million verified users across more than 70 jurisdictions, trading on NYSE’s upcoming digital assets ATS, expected to go live before year-end.
Rather than waiting for crypto-native capital to migrate toward traditional brokerages on its own, NYSE is essentially embedding its products directly into networks where that digital liquidity already sits.
Peter Smith, Blockchain.com’s CEO, said tokenized stocks represent one of the most impactful shifts in modern finance, arguing people “shouldn’t be limited in owning stocks” based on geography or brokerage access.
Lynn Martin, NYSE Group’s president, described the future of capital markets as belonging to institutions that combine “the trust of traditional finance with the innovation” of digital assets, calling Blockchain.com’s international reach a natural fit for the platform at launch.
Built on NYSE’s existing Pillar matching engine, the digital ATS is designed to support stablecoin funding and on-chain settlement, while ensuring tokenized shares carry the same rights as traditional stock, dividends and voting included.
The deal also includes a two-way market data arrangement: NYSE affiliate ICE Data Services will distribute Blockchain.com’s crypto analytics to institutional subscribers, while Blockchain.com folds NYSE and ICE’s real-time equity feeds into its own retail app.
This adds to NYSE’s growing list of crypto infrastructure partners, which already includes OKX, Securitize and tZERO.
Puffer Finance Partners With Anchorage Digital for Institutional Custody on Puffer UniFi
Puffer Finance has partnered with Anchorage Digital, home to America’s first federally regulated crypto bank, to bring institutional custody and stablecoin infrastructure to Puffer UniFi, Puffer’s Ethereum-aligned execution and settlement network.
Anchorage will serve as UniFi’s day-one institutional custodian. Not a feature bolted on after launch, but part of the network’s foundation from the start.
Beyond custody, the two companies plan to work together on stablecoin issuance, native settlement and institutional payment infrastructure running on the network, which is built to support high-throughput execution and real-time settlement while staying connected to Ethereum’s main liquidity through what the companies call synchronous composability, giving institutions faster execution without cutting them off from Ethereum’s existing security and liquidity.
There’s also an agentic payments angle: combining Anchorage’s institutional payment infrastructure with UniFi’s settlement environment to build rails meant for increasingly automated, programmable onchain financial activity.
This follows a separate Puffer partnership with Google Cloud announced just a week earlier, in which Google Cloud joined Puffer Preconf as a registered gateway.
Amir Forouzani, Puffer’s co-founder, said custody and settlement infrastructure “need to evolve together” as payments get more programmable.
Nathan McCauley, Anchorage’s CEO, said institutions want to hold assets and settle transactions onchain “with the same security and controls” they already expect everywhere else in their business, and having that in place from day one is the point of starting the partnership this early.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in crypto, AI, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in crypto, AI, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
