The company revealed that PNC Bank is expanding its partnership with Coinbase to offer direct bitcoin trading to eligible PNC Private Bank clients.
This new service is powered by Coinbase’s Crypto as a Service platform. It is a technology system that lets banks integrate digital assets into their own apps.
A Simple Way for Clients to Access Bitcoin
For the first time, a major United States bank will let clients buy, sell, and hold bitcoin inside their regular accounts without using a separate exchange. It shows how fast the line between traditional banking and digital assets is disappearing.
PNC is one of the ten largest banks in the country. Until now, most large banks avoided offering direct bitcoin access and instead sent clients to outside platforms. This partnership changes that model. People who qualify can now use PNC’s online banking system to trade bitcoin, similar to how they view savings or manage investments.
With @coinbase‘s Crypto-as-a-Service (“CaaS”) market leading infrastructure, PNC is first to enable clients to buy, hold and sell bitcoin directly with PNC’s own digital banking platform.
— PNC News (@PNCNews) December 9, 2025
Coinbase powers the backend. It provides secure storage, trading tools, and regulatory safeguards so banks do not need to build everything themselves. This type of service, known as Crypto as a Service, makes it easier for institutions to add digital assets without taking on the technical workload. A similar approach has already grown in popularity in Europe, where regulated banks in Germany and Switzerland now hold billions of dollars in client crypto assets. The move by PNC shows the United States is catching up.
Today marks a major milestone for institutional crypto adoption.@Coinbase’s Crypto-as-a-Service platform is now powering @PNCBank’s launch of direct bitcoin trading for PNC Private Bank clients – the first to market with such an offering among the major U.S. banks. pic.twitter.com/wwuOIRuBfK
— Coinbase Institutional 🛡️ (@CoinbaseInsto) December 9, 2025
The shift is part of a larger trend. Over the last two years, major financial institutions have increased their involvement with digital assets. Spot bitcoin exchange traded funds reached more than seventy billion dollars in assets this year, driven by traditional investors who want simple access points. At the same time, high net worth clients are asking banks for digital asset services that feel familiar and safe.
More About Coinbase
Coinbase explained that despite a rough November, market conditions may now be setting up what they called a December to remember. The firm noted that leverage reset across the board, with open interest in major perpetual pairs dropping sixteen percent month over month and US spot ETFs seeing several billion dollars in outflows from both Bitcoin and ether. Even funding rates dipped well below their normal range before recovering.
A rocky November may have set the stage for a December to remember.
Positioning reset in November:
• Open interest across BTC/ETH/SOL perps was down 16% MoM
• U.S. spot ETFs saw $3.5B $BTC and $1.4B $ETH in outflows
• BTC perp funding rates dropped 2σ below their 90-day… pic.twitter.com/qApZFuMF2X— Coinbase Institutional 🛡️ (@CoinbaseInsto) December 9, 2025
While those numbers might look negative at first glance, Coinbase says they point to something healthy. Speculative excess has been cleared out. Their systemic leverage ratio, which measures purely speculative positioning, has settled near five percent of total market cap, far below the ten percent levels seen in the summer.
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