BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Google Back Open USD — 140-Firm Consortium Launches Stablecoin to Challenge USDC/USDT Duopoly as Circle Stock Plunges 12%

What Happened

On June 30, 2026, Open Standard, an independent company led by Zach Abrams — co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge (acquired by Stripe in 2024) — unveiled Open USD (OUSD), a new stablecoin backed by a consortium of more than 140 companies.

Founding partners include Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa, and BlackRock, with broader backing from Google, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, U.S. Bank, Shopify, IBM, Mercado Pago, Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, MetaMask, Aave, Solana, Polygon, and Ripple.

The token will launch natively on Solana later in 2026.

The Model: Shared Reserve Income

Unlike existing stablecoins where a single issuer (Circle for USDC, Tether for USDT) retains the Treasury bill interest on reserves, Open USD takes a fundamentally different approach:

• Free minting and redemption — no fees for partners to create or redeem tokens
• Reserve income distributed to partners — participating businesses receive a share of the yield generated on U.S. Treasury reserves, less a management fee
• Shared governance — no single company controls the network

This directly targets Circle's core revenue stream. Circle earns revenue by investing USDC reserves in short-term U.S. Treasuries and retaining the interest. Open USD instead distributes that yield to its partner network.

Market Impact

Circle (CRCL) shares tumbled more than 12% to $66, hitting a four-month low. The drop reflects investor concern that Open USD's consortium model — with its partner-distributed yield — undercuts Circle's issuer-centric economics.

For context, the stablecoin market currently stands at over $300 billion:

• USDT (Tether): ~$145 billion market cap
• USDC (Circle): ~$73 billion market cap
• All others: ~$82 billion combined

Citi has projected the stablecoin market could reach $4 trillion by 2030.

Notable Quotes

Zach Abrams (Open Standard CEO): "Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that's open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests."

Samara Cohen (BlackRock, Global Head of Market Development): "We believe stablecoins can play an important role in the evolution of digital markets when supported by trusted infrastructure and practical utility. Open USD is a constructive step toward giving businesses more choice in how they access tokenized value and participate in internet native digital rails."

Jeremy Allaire (Circle CEO, on X): "Stablecoins represent one of the largest market opportunities in the world as the internet transforms the infrastructure for storing and moving money."

Comparable Models

Open USD's revenue-sharing structure resembles the Global Dollar Network (USDG), a stablecoin consortium led by Paxos and backed by Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy Digital. In Europe, Qivalis — a consortium of 37+ banks — is building a euro-denominated stablecoin with a similar shared-infrastructure thesis.

The breadth of Open USD's backing — spanning payments (Visa, Mastercard), banking (BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, U.S. Bank), tech (Google, IBM, Shopify), and crypto (Coinbase, Anchorage, MetaMask, Aave, Ripple) — exceeds any prior stablecoin consortium.

Why It Matters

Stablecoins have evolved from crypto trading tools to cross-border payment infrastructure, merchant settlement rails, and corporate treasury instruments. The question of who controls the underlying infrastructure — and who captures the reserve yield — is becoming the central competitive battleground in digital finance.

Open USD represents the most significant institutional challenge to the stablecoin duopoly since USDC and USDT established their dominance. The consortium's combined reach — Visa and Mastercard process trillions in annual payment volume, BlackRock manages $10+ trillion in AUM, Shopify powers millions of merchants — gives OUSD a distribution channel that no single stablecoin issuer can match.

The launch also intersects with the CLARITY Act's stablecoin provisions in the Senate, where JPMorgan has separately warned that weak guardrails on yield-bearing stablecoins could create "shadow banking" risks.