Open Standard, led by Stripe-Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams, unveiled Open USD (OUSD) on June 30 with backing from 140+ companies including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Coinbase, BNY, Standard Chartered, and DBS. The stablecoin offers free minting/redemption and distributes reserve income to partners rather than retaining it — a direct assault on Circle's business model. Circle (CRCL) shares dropped 12%+ to $66, a 4-month low.
Open Standard, led by Stripe-Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams, unveiled Open USD (OUSD) on June 30 with backing from 140+ companies including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Coinbase, BNY, Standard Chartered, and DBS. The stablecoin offers free minting/redemption and distributes reserve income to partners rather than retaining it — a direct assault on Circle's business model. Circle (CRCL) shares dropped 12%+ to $66, a 4-month low.
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.
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:
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.
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:
Citi has projected the stablecoin market could reach $4 trillion by 2030.
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."
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.
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.
The OCC granted Circle final approval to establish Circle National Trust, a federally supervised national trust bank, placing the world's second-largest stablecoin (USDC, $73.2B) under direct federal banking oversight — with reserve management as a planned future capability.
Morgan Stanley amended SEC filings for its proposed Ethereum (MSSE) and Solana (MSOL) ETFs with a 0.14% management fee — the lowest in crypto ETFs — while offering staking yield (50-80% ETH, up to 100% SOL). Its Bitcoin ETF (MSBT), launched just April 8, already holds $364M.
SWIFT announced its blockchain-based shared ledger is ready for initial use, with 17 Tier 1 banks across six continents preparing to pilot live tokenized deposit transactions. The network — used by 11,500+ financial institutions and moving the equivalent of global GDP every 2-3 days — built the ledger in just nine months, marking the most significant mainstream blockchain deployment by traditional finance infrastructure.