A consortium of more than 140 companies — including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, American Express, BNY Mellon, and Standard Chartered — announced Open USD (OUSD) on June 30, 2026, a new dollar-backed stablecoin that redistributes reserve income to distribution partners r...
"It's a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it." — Zach Abrams, CEO, Open Standard (co-founder, Bridge)
A consortium of more than 140 companies — including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, American Express, BNY Mellon, and Standard Chartered — announced Open USD (OUSD) on June 30, 2026, a new dollar-backed stablecoin that redistributes reserve income to distribution partners rather than retaining it for a single issuer. Circle Internet Group (CRCL) shares fell 13.6% on the day to $65.63, erasing approximately $2.5 billion in market capitalization.
The announcement represents the most significant structural challenge to the incumbent stablecoin duopoly since Meta's Libra project in 2019. Where Libra was blocked by regulators before launch, Open USD arrives into a market now governed by the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, which explicitly permits regulated stablecoin issuance. The consortium's scale — spanning global banks, card networks, crypto exchanges, and technology platforms — suggests a coordinated effort to restructure who captures value in a $300 billion stablecoin market where two issuers currently control approximately 88% of supply.
Open Standard, an independent entity led by founding CEO Zach Abrams — co-founder of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure startup Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2024 — unveiled Open USD on June 30, 2026. The stablecoin will be backed 1:1 by U.S. dollar reserves held in short-term U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents.
Launch is expected later in 2026, with native issuance planned on Solana, Stellar, Base (Coinbase's Layer 2), and Polygon. The project's initial blockchain footprint spans both crypto-native chains and an institutional-grade L2, signaling intent to serve both DeFi protocols and traditional payment corridors.
Key structural features disclosed at announcement:
The 140+ founding partners span five distinct categories, a breadth unmatched by any prior stablecoin launch:
Global Banks: BNY Mellon, Standard Chartered, DBS, BBVA, U.S. Bank
Card Networks & Payments: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Mercado Pago
Asset Management: BlackRock
Crypto Infrastructure: Coinbase, Aave, MetaMask, Morpho, Solana, Polygon, Ripple, Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, Bybit, OKX
Technology Platforms: Google, Shopify, IBM, DoorDash
The structure resembles a payment network — closer to how Visa and Mastercard themselves were originally organized as bank-owned cooperatives — than a typical crypto token launch. The governing board is drawn from participating partner organizations rather than appointed by a single founding company.
Notably absent from the consortium: Tether and Circle, the two incumbents whose combined stablecoin supply exceeds $260 billion.
The core thesis behind Open USD is that the current stablecoin business model contains a structural misalignment: issuers capture nearly all reserve income while distribution partners — exchanges, wallets, payment processors, and merchants — generate the transaction volume that gives stablecoins their utility.
Under the current model, Circle earned $653 million in reserve income in Q1 2026 alone, derived from a 3.5% annualized yield on U.S. Treasury holdings backing approximately $77 billion in USDC circulation. The company reported $694 million in total revenue for the quarter. Tether reported $1.04 billion in Q1 2026 net profit and exceeded $10 billion in net profit for full-year 2025, on a reserve pool exceeding $183.5 billion.
Open USD proposes to invert this value flow. Reserve income generated by Treasury holdings backing OUSD will be distributed to consortium partners, with Open Standard retaining only a management fee. Partners that distribute, integrate, or facilitate OUSD transactions receive a proportional share of interest income — creating a direct financial incentive to grow circulation.
The mechanism functions as a rebate structure: the more OUSD a partner helps put into circulation, the larger its share of reserve income. This aligns partner incentives with network growth in a way the current issuer-centric model does not.
At current Treasury yields of approximately 3.5%, a hypothetical $50 billion OUSD circulation would generate roughly $1.75 billion in annual reserve income available for distribution — revenue that under the incumbent model flows almost entirely to the issuer.
The stablecoin reserve income business is among the highest-margin financial operations in existence. Consider the scale:
| Issuer | Circulation (Q1 2026) | Reserve Income (Q1 2026) | Annual Profit (2025) | |--------|----------------------|--------------------------|---------------------| | Tether (USDT) | ~$183.5B | ~$3.1B (annualized recurring) | $10.1B | | Circle (USDC) | ~$77B | $653M | N/A (public from April 2026) |
Tether operates with fewer than 100 employees. Circle, despite $694 million in Q1 revenue, saw operating margins compress from 16% to 6% as it scaled its public-company infrastructure and spent $242 million in operating costs — a 76% year-over-year increase.
The Open USD consortium model attacks this concentration directly. If major exchanges and payment processors redirect stablecoin volume toward OUSD because they receive reserve income for doing so, the economic incentive to hold or distribute USDC and USDT weakens. A merchant using Stripe for payments, a trader on Coinbase, or a consumer using Visa all represent potential distribution channels that could shift volume toward OUSD — because their platforms are consortium members who financially benefit from doing so.
According to Citi, the total stablecoin market could reach $4 trillion by 2030. The question is no longer whether stablecoins will achieve scale, but who captures the economics at scale.
Open USD is not the first yield-sharing stablecoin. Paxos launched Global Dollar (USDG) in November 2024, built around a similar premise: share reserve returns with distribution partners including Robinhood, Kraken, Anchorage Digital, Galaxy, and Nuvei.
USDG reached approximately $2.75 billion in supply by mid-2026 — material but a fraction of USDC's $77 billion. The comparison is instructive: USDG demonstrated that yield-sharing could attract distribution partners, but achieving meaningful scale requires broader ecosystem buy-in.
Open USD's consortium is an order of magnitude larger. Where USDG launched with roughly a dozen partners concentrated in crypto exchanges, OUSD arrives with 140+ partners across banking, payments, technology, and crypto. The inclusion of Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Google — companies collectively processing trillions of dollars in annual payment volume — represents distribution infrastructure that USDG lacked.
Open USD launches into a newly clarified U.S. regulatory environment. The GENIUS Act, enacted July 18, 2025, establishes a federal framework for payment stablecoin issuance. Key provisions include:
As of June 2026, the OCC, Treasury Department, and other agencies have issued proposed rules but none have been finalized. The regulatory window creates both opportunity and risk: Open Standard can design compliance architecture around known requirements, but final rules may impose additional obligations.
Internationally, the EU's MiCA framework took full effect July 1, 2026, and the UK's FCA finalized its crypto rulebook in June 2026. Open USD's inclusion of global banks — Standard Chartered, DBS, BBVA — suggests intent to pursue multi-jurisdictional licensing.
Markets responded immediately. Circle (CRCL) shares fell 13.6% to $65.63, a four-month low, with the stock dropping $10.33 in a single session. The decline reflected concern that OUSD's yield-sharing model directly threatens Circle's core revenue stream — reserve income accounted for 94% of Circle's Q1 2026 total revenue.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire responded: "We welcome continued innovation and competition in the space and look forward to remaining laser-focused on building the best stablecoin infrastructure possible."
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino wrote: "Welcome OUSD. Player 2 has entered the game." The confidence may reflect Tether's structural advantages: approximately $8.23 billion in excess reserves, $20 billion in physical gold holdings, and a dominant 59% stablecoin market share that is concentrated in non-U.S. markets where consortium governance structures carry less weight.
Several open questions remain unanswered in the initial announcement:
Open USD's announcement marks a structural inflection point in stablecoin market organization. The question it poses is not whether stablecoins will reach trillions in circulation — projections from Citi and others suggest they will — but whether the economics of that circulation will remain concentrated in one or two issuers, or be distributed across the networks that generate the underlying transaction volume.
The consortium model has a clear theoretical advantage: by aligning the financial incentives of 140+ distribution partners with network growth, it creates a self-reinforcing adoption loop that single-issuer stablecoins cannot replicate. The practical challenge is equally clear: coordinating governance, compliance, and revenue distribution across a heterogeneous coalition of banks, crypto exchanges, and technology companies at global scale has no precedent in either traditional finance or crypto.
The stablecoin market is entering a phase where the product itself — a digital dollar pegged 1:1 to USD — is a commodity. The competition has shifted to distribution economics. Open USD is a bet that the companies moving money will no longer accept leaving the economics on the table for those who merely issue it.