Interactive Brokers Now Accepts Stablecoins in a Bid to Remain Competitive

Interactive Brokers will now allow retail investors to fund individual brokerage accounts with stablecoins, a step aimed at keeping pace with the increasingly competitive retail trading market, Bloomberg reported Friday.

The Greenwich, Connecticut-based brokerage firm competes with rivals including Robinhood Markets Inc. and Charles Schwab Corp. and earlier this year expanded its cryptocurrency trading capabilities alongside its offerings of stocks, options and futures.

The development highlights how traditional brokerages are increasingly incorporating crypto-linked features to hold on to retail clients as digital assets gain a firmer foothold in mainstream finance. Allowing stablecoins to be used for account funding places Interactive Brokers among a growing group of firms testing blockchain-based payment rails to reduce friction and speed up transfers, while keeping pace with rivals such as Robinhood that have more aggressively expanded into crypto.

The firm will gradually introduce the feature, starting with a portion of eligible US clients, an Interactive Brokers spokesperson confirmed in an emailed statement. The firm's chairman, Thomas Peteterffty, initially announced the new capability at a Goldman Sachs conference on Wednesday,

Using stablecoins allows customers to fund accounts directly from cryptocurrency wallets rather than bank accounts.

Interactive Brokers has also been active in adjacent crypto markets, including prediction markets tied to economic events.

In October, Interactive Brokers led a $104 million funding round for crypto and stablecoin infrastructure provider ZeroHash, which valued the company at $1 billion. That came months after Peterffy told Reuters the firm was exploring issuing its own stablecoin, while also considering allowing customers to fund accounts using tokens issued by third parties.

The firm did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

• As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
• GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
• Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.

• Strategy (MSTR) will remain in the Nasdaq 100 index despite a major reshuffle, which saw several household names dropped.
• The firm's business model, which involves stockpiling bitcoin, has drawn criticism from analysts and index providers, with MSCI considering excluding crypto treasury companies from its benchmarks.
• The Nasdaq 100 rebalance saw six companies dropped and three new additions, with changes taking effect on December 22, but Strategy's bitcoin-heavy strategy secured its spot.

Disclosure & Polices: CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk has adopted a set of principles aimed at ensuring the integrity, editorial independence and freedom from bias of its publications. CoinDesk is part of Bullish (NYSE:BLSH), an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. Bullish owns and invests in digital asset businesses and digital assets and CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive Bullish equity-based compensation.