A coalition of more than 140 companies – among them Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, and Coinbase – announced today the design of the Open Standard and the launch of Open USD (OUSD), a new dollar stablecoin built to redistribute the wealth of the $300 billion stablecoin market.
The project is led by Zach Abrams, co-founder of Bridge, a stablecoin company that acquired Stripe in 2024.
“The current money has a lot of power,” Abrams he said in his words, “But for mass adoption, businesses need something that’s open, affordable, scalable, accessible, and tailored to their needs.”
The announcement sent Circle shares down as much as 15% on Tuesday, a sign of how Open USD is directly targeting the USDC provider’s business model.
The main principle of Open USD is straightforward: there are no investment fees, no redemption fees, no volume limits – and most of the interest generated by the stablecoin’s reserves goes to the companies that use it, minus the operating costs that are kept by the Open Standard.
Savings is what makes it Around and Tether beneficial. All issuers invest in stablecoins backed by short-term US Treasury bonds and hold the yield automatically. Circle’s USDC has a market cap of about $73 billion; Tether’s USDT is sitting at about $145 billion. Open USD intends to share the yield with its distribution network instead.
Governance follows the same principle. Instead of a single developer, the Open Standard is overseen by an independent organization that makes decisions among participating companies.
Who is supporting Open USD?
The list of affiliates spans almost all financial sectors. Payment networks include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. Banks include BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, and US Bank. On the technology side: Google, Shopify, and IBM. Crypto companies include Coinbase, Ripple, MetaMask, Aave, Bybit, OKX, Galaxy, Fireblocks, and Anchorage Digital.
“Today, we announced that Visa is joining Open Standard along with Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, US Bank, BBVA, Standard Chartered and 100-plus early partners with the goal of offering Open USD,” Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, he wrote on X.
Open USD is expected to be later in 2026 on Solana, Stellar, Base, and Polygon. Tempo CEO Matt Huang confirmed that OUSD will be offered online from day one, with support for payments, currencies, exchanges, and DeFi.
Open Standard is not the first consortium to test this model. Paxos they lead Global Dollar Network (USDG) – supported by Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy Digital – on the same idea: share savings, increase adoption.
In Europe, 37 banks and payment providers have them organization around Qivalis, the euro-denominated stablecoin, as institutions push back against the dominance of the US dollar in the financial sector.
Punctuality is not an accident. Stablecoins have moved out of crypto trading and into cross-border payments, trading platforms, and financial industry services.
Citi work the market will reach $4 trillion by 2030.
