PNC Bank test converts USDC payment into US dollar deposit

This pilot program allows eligible corporate and institutional clients to receive USDC on Ethereum, with each token being exchanged for $1 before being deposited.

PNC Bank, which is ranked as the eighth largest bank in the United States by asset size, has launched a limited pilot program that allows eligible corporate and institutional customers to receive USDC payments through Coinbase.

This pilot project uses the Coinbase Payments product to receive USDC on Ethereum. USDC is a stablecoin issued by Circle and pegged to the US dollar. Payments will be automatically converted into US dollars and deposited into the designated PNC account, allowing enterprises to accept payments in stablecoins without having to hold them themselves.

PNC indicates that this service is aimed at accelerating the speed of fund arrival and improving the efficiency of cross-border payments. The bank has not disclosed the fees, settlement time benchmarks, or the number of participating customers; as of the time of publication, it has also not responded to requests for comments on more details posed by Cointelegraph.

This pilot is built on the cooperation established by both parties in July 2025. At that time, PNC agreed to provide cryptocurrency services through the infrastructure of Coinbase, while also providing banking services for this exchange. This cooperation subsequently led to PNC launching Bitcoin (BTC) trading services for eligible PNC Private Bank customers in December.

The measures taken by PNC follow closely on the heels of similar actions by Citibank. In September, Citibank expanded its collaboration with Coinbase, allowing institutional clients to receive payments in stablecoins through its Spring by Citi platform, with Coinbase converting these payments into fiat currency.

According to DefiLlama data, calculated by market capitalization, USDC is the second-largest stablecoin, with a scale of 70.5 billion US dollars, followed by USDT of Tether, which has a scale of 176.8 billion US dollars. On Monday, the total scale of the stablecoin market was approximately 290.8 billion US dollars.