A consortium of more than 140 companies — including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, BNY, and Ripple — announced Open USD (OUSD) on June 30, 2026, a new dollar-pegged stablecoin that eliminates minting fees and distributes reserve yield directly to particip...
"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." — Zach Abrams, Founding CEO, Open Standard
A consortium of more than 140 companies — including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, BNY, and Ripple — announced Open USD (OUSD) on June 30, 2026, a new dollar-pegged stablecoin that eliminates minting fees and distributes reserve yield directly to participating businesses. Circle shares fell 16% on the day to $63.99, extending a one-month decline to 39%.
The announcement redraws the competitive map in a stablecoin market now valued at approximately $312 billion. OUSD targets the economic structure that sustains incumbents: the reserve-income model. Where Circle retained $2.637 billion in reserve income on USDC in FY2025, OUSD proposes to return nearly all of that yield to partners, retaining only a management fee. The question is whether a consortium can convert 140 logos into actual circulation — a test that Paxos' USDG, launched with a similar revenue-sharing model in late 2024, has so far failed, reaching only $3 billion in supply versus USDC's $73 billion.
Open Standard, a newly formed independent company, introduced Open USD on June 30, 2026. The stablecoin operates on three structural principles:
The entity is led by Zach Abrams, who co-founded Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2025. Open Standard positions OUSD as "neutral infrastructure for payments, trading and the internet economy."
The partner roster spans payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen), asset managers (BlackRock, BNY), banks (Standard Chartered, DBS, Commonwealth Bank of Australia), technology firms (Google, Samsung Electronics, IBM, Shopify), and crypto-native companies (Coinbase, Ripple, Aptos Labs, Solana, Aave, Fireblocks).
OUSD is scheduled to launch later in 2026 across multiple blockchains, with Solana, Base, Stellar, and Polygon confirmed as initial networks.
Circle (CRCL:NYSE) fell as much as 16% on June 30 to $63.99 per share, its lowest since late February. The decline extended a brutal one-month selloff of 39%.
The market read the announcement as a direct attack on Circle's business model. Approximately 99% of Circle's revenue derives from interest on USDC reserves. In FY2025, reserve income was $2.637 billion out of $2.747 billion in total revenue. Q1 2026 revenue rose 20% year-over-year to $694 million, but the growth trajectory now faces a structural challenge: a consortium offering to return that same reserve income to the businesses that hold stablecoins.
"I think it is an overreaction," said Owen Lau, Managing Director at Clear Street, regarding the selloff.
Rob Hadick of Dragonfly Capital offered a different view: "The marquee partner names clearly suggest a real threat to Circle's business."
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino was characteristically direct: "Welcome OUSD. Player 2 has entered the game."
Samara Cohen of BlackRock — which is both a Circle reserve manager and an OUSD partner — called it "a constructive step toward giving businesses more choice."
The stablecoin business model to date has been straightforward. Users deposit dollars. The issuer invests those dollars in short-term U.S. Treasuries and overnight repos. The issuer keeps the yield.
The numbers are substantial. Circle reported a reserve return rate of 4.1% in FY2025, down from 5.0% in FY2024, on average USDC circulation of $64.87 billion. Tether, with approximately $186 billion in USDT outstanding and $94 billion in Treasury bills, generates even larger sums. Tether's reserves are 82.3% in cash equivalents, primarily Treasuries.
OUSD proposes to invert this. Instead of the issuer capturing reserve yield, the participating businesses — the ones driving adoption — receive it. The management fee retained by Open Standard has not been publicly disclosed, but the structure represents a fundamental shift in who captures value in stablecoin economics.
For Circle, the threat is compounded by distribution costs. According to CoinDesk reporting, Circle paid Coinbase $908 million in distribution fees in a single recent year. Coinbase is now an OUSD partner. The economics of that relationship face obvious pressure.
Circle's diversification efforts are underway. Management raised its 2026 "other revenue" guidance to $150-$170 million, reflecting growth in SaaS and API services. But that segment remains a fraction of reserve income.
The stablecoin market as of mid-2026:
| Stablecoin | Supply | Market Share | Issuer Model | |---|---|---|---| | USDT (Tether) | ~$186B | ~58-62% | Single issuer, retains all yield | | USDC (Circle) | ~$73B | ~25% | Single issuer, retains yield, pays distribution fees | | USDG (Paxos) | ~$3B | <1% | Revenue-sharing with partners | | OUSD (Open Standard) | $0 (pre-launch) | 0% | Revenue-sharing, zero-fee, consortium governance |
USDT and USDC together account for approximately 93% of total stablecoin market capitalization of $312 billion.
The USDG precedent is instructive. Paxos launched the Global Dollar Network in late 2024 with a similar revenue-sharing proposition. Despite partnerships with notable firms, USDG has reached only $3 billion in supply — a rounding error against the incumbents. This suggests that economics alone do not determine stablecoin adoption. Liquidity depth, exchange integration, DeFi composability, and user inertia all contribute to incumbency advantages.
OUSD's backers argue scale will differ. The consortium includes the three largest payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express), which collectively process trillions in annual volume. Whether that processing infrastructure translates into stablecoin circulation is untested.
The comparison to Meta's Libra (later Diem) is unavoidable. In 2019, Facebook assembled a consortium of major companies — Visa and Mastercard among them — to launch a global stablecoin. Regulatory opposition dismantled the project by 2022. Diem's assets were sold to Silvergate Capital for approximately $200 million.
OUSD's proponents argue the environment has changed. The GENIUS Act, enacted July 18, 2025, provides a federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins. The OCC and FDIC have both issued proposed rules for implementation, with final regulations due by July 18, 2026, and the Act taking effect no later than January 18, 2027.
Key differences from Libra: OUSD is led by financial services incumbents rather than a social media company; a federal regulatory framework now exists; and the stablecoin market has grown from near-zero to $312 billion, establishing commercial precedent.
Key similarities: a large consortium with potentially misaligned incentives; a pre-launch product with zero circulation; and significant execution risk in converting corporate commitments to user adoption.
Meta, notably absent from the OUSD consortium, has taken a different path. In April 2026, Meta began paying creators in USDC stablecoins on Solana and Polygon, with Stripe handling payment infrastructure.
The GENIUS Act shapes the competitive landscape for all stablecoin issuers:
The Act requires permitted payment stablecoin issuers to maintain reserves backing outstanding stablecoins on at least a 1:1 basis, with assets that are identifiable, segregated, and not commingled. Both USDC and OUSD would need to comply with these requirements.
The regulatory framework is notable for what it enables: banks and non-bank entities can issue payment stablecoins under federal oversight. This provides OUSD — with its bank and fintech partner base — a clearer path to compliance than Libra ever had.
The stablecoin market currently operates under Citi projections that it could reach $4 trillion by 2030. BNY projects $1.5 trillion by the same date. Either figure implies substantial room for new entrants, though the distribution of market share among them remains uncertain.
Analysts have identified several obstacles OUSD must clear:
Consortium coordination. "Consortiums are hard and they break easily. Incentives are broad and often misaligned," Hadick of Dragonfly noted.
Conversion of partnerships to usage. Omid Malekan of Columbia Business School described the current phase as "logo spray and pray" — assembling names is easy but "changing corporate behavior and business models is hard."
Lack of specificity. Noelle Acheson of Crypto Is Macro Now observed that Open Standard "is vague on some key issues" including ownership structure and blockchain launch plans.
Liquidity bootstrapping. A stablecoin's utility is proportional to its liquidity. OUSD launches with zero supply into a market where USDT and USDC are deeply embedded in exchange order books, DeFi lending pools, and cross-border payment corridors.
The USDG precedent. Paxos' revenue-sharing model has produced $3 billion in supply over roughly 18 months. OUSD proponents must explain why their outcome will differ by orders of magnitude.
Governance complexity. With 140+ partners sharing governance, decision-making speed — critical in fintech — could suffer. Visa, Google, and Aave have fundamentally different priorities.
OUSD represents the most credible challenge to the stablecoin duopoly since Libra. The partner list is formidable. The economic proposition — redistributing reserve yield to distributors — addresses a genuine structural tension in the current market. Circle captures billions in reserve income while paying hundreds of millions to distributors who now have the option to claim that yield directly.
Whether OUSD can convert 140 corporate logos into meaningful circulation remains the central question. Stablecoin adoption is driven by liquidity, integration depth, and user trust — not corporate announcements. Paxos' USDG offers a cautionary data point. The stablecoin market may be large enough for multiple winners, but the distance from announcement to $73 billion in circulation is measured in years of execution, not press releases.
The market has rendered its initial verdict on what this means for Circle. Whether that verdict holds depends on OUSD's ability to ship a product, not just a partner list.