Interactive Brokers allowed international investors to fund their brokerage accounts with stablecoins 24/7, providing near-instant crediting of funds, lower transaction costs, and faster access to trading on global markets.
Interactive Brokers LLC, a brokerage firm operating the largest electronic trading platform in the U.S. by number of transactions, announced that clients who meet the established criteria can fund their brokerage accounts using stablecoins.
The new funding method will be available around the clock, including weekends and public holidays, and will allow clients to begin trading on 170 international financial markets within minutes of sending digital assets. At the initial stage, Interactive Brokers clients will be able to fund their accounts only with USDC. However, the company plans to add support for Ripple’s RLUSD and PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoins next week.
Clients wishing to fund their brokerage accounts with stablecoins will receive dedicated secure wallets from ZeroHash, to which assets will be transferred from external wallets. Once received, the stablecoins will be automatically converted into U.S. dollars and credited to the client’s brokerage account. Interactive Brokers won’t charge a fee for funding accounts with stablecoins. Clients will only pay the blockchain fee, as well as a ZeroHash conversion fee of 0.3% of the deposit amount, with a minimum of $1.
According to the press release, the initiative is aimed at removing key limitations of cross-border transfers for international investors. Milan Galik, CEO of Interactive Brokers, noted that in a number of jurisdictions, U.S. dollar bank transfers remain expensive, slow, and dependent on complex chains of correspondent banks. The use of stablecoins, he said, makes it possible to bypass these barriers, providing near-instant settlement and lower transaction costs compared to traditional bank transfers.
In mid-2025, Interactive Brokers announced plans to issue its own stablecoin to enable 24/7 crypto funding for client accounts.
