PNC customers will soon be able to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrency through the bank’s new partnership with Coinbase.
“Partnering with Coinbase accelerates our ability to bring innovative, crypto financial solutions to our clients,” said PNC CEO Bill Demchak in a prepared statement Tuesday.
“We will also provide PNC's best-in-class banking services to Coinbase,” he said. “This collaboration enables us to meet growing demand for secure and streamlined access to digital assets on PNC's trusted platform.”
Coinbase is the nation’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. As of February, it held nearly half a trillion dollars in assets, which would make it akin to the 21st-largest bank in the country, according to CEO Brian Armstrong.
“If you think of us more like a brokerage, we'd be the 8th largest brokerage today by AUM,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Coinbase will support PNC’s entry into the digital asset market with its crypto-as-a-service platform, “which provides PNC with a powerful set of tools to develop a scalable, high-growth business, built on a foundation of uncompromising security,” said Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, in a prepared statement Tuesday.
The distance between the crypto realm and traditional finance has been closing in 2025 due to relaxed regulatory oversight and a push for federal crypto legislation. The GENIUS Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump on Friday, creates a regulatory framework for stablecoins. Meanwhile, the CLARITY Act, which would divide regulatory oversight between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission and create a framework for digital assets, is moving through the legislature.
Several crypto-bank partnerships have been inked in recent months. BNY said last week that it would custody the reserves of Ripple’s new stablecoin, Ripple USD, weeks after striking a similar partnership with Societe Generale regarding its CoinVertible USD.
Digital native bank Green Dot announced a partnership with Crypto.com in May, offering banking and money management tools to the crypto exchange’s U.S. customers through Arc, the bank’s embedded finance platform.
SoFi CEO Anthony Noto also said in May that his firm would re-enter the crypto business, which it exited in 2023, in the next six months.
Brad Rustin, chair of law firm Nelson Mullins’ financial services regulatory practice in Greenville, South Carolina, told Banking Dive in May that “lots and lots and lots of banks” are talking about getting in on crypto amidst the Trump administration’s regulatory shifts.
The interest is largely coming from two verticals, Rustin said: fintech-forward banks that have long had an understanding of crypto assets, and large banks that have sizable securities custodial programs.
“[The latter] are banks that did securities lending, that did margin lending, that did traditional custody services for stocks and bonds,” Rustin said. “They’re saying, ‘Well, look, this is no different than custodying a stock or a bond. It’s just how you actually control it and how you maintain it that’s different.’”
