A consortium of 140-plus firms — including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Coinbase, Google, and Shopify — publicly launched Open Standard on June 30, 2026, to issue Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-backed stablecoin designed to redistribute reserve economics from issuer to ecosystem participa...
"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, CEO, Open Standard (formerly co-founder/CEO of Bridge)
A consortium of 140-plus firms — including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Coinbase, Google, and Shopify — publicly launched Open Standard on June 30, 2026, to issue Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-backed stablecoin designed to redistribute reserve economics from issuer to ecosystem participants. Circle (CRCL) shares fell 17% on the day of announcement.
On July 16, 2026, Visa followed with the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), an enterprise infrastructure layer supporting Open USD minting, wallets, and treasury management for its network of 15,000 financial institutions and 200 million merchants. The platform is in beta with select institutional clients.
The combined effect: a direct competitive challenge to Circle's USDC ($73.8B market cap, 24% market share) and Tether's USDT ($184B, 59% share) — not from a startup, but from the incumbents that control payment rails, custody infrastructure, and merchant distribution. Mizuho downgraded Circle to underperform on July 14, cutting its price target from $85 to $50, citing OUSD's revenue-sharing model as a structural threat to Circle's 99% reserve-income-dependent business model.
Open Standard is an independent company governed by a consortium of its partners. It was publicly unveiled on June 30, 2026, with over 140 member firms spanning banking, payments, fintech, crypto, and technology.
Confirmed partners include:
| Category | Members | |----------|---------| | Card Networks | Visa, Mastercard | | Banks | BNY, US Bank, Standard Chartered, DBS, OCBC | | Crypto | Coinbase, Ripple, OKX, Bybit | | Payments/Fintech | Stripe, Adyen, Shopify | | Asset Managers | BlackRock | | Technology | Google, IBM |
Leadership: Zach Abrams, co-founder and former CEO of Bridge (the stablecoin infrastructure company acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in October 2024, closed February 2025), serves as Open Standard's founding CEO. Bridge provides the underlying issuance and orchestration infrastructure.
Governance: A consortium-governance model in which partners share in reserve earnings rather than ceding control to a single issuer. The board of directors is composed of partner companies, distributing both decision-making authority and economic benefit.
Open USD (OUSD) is a US dollar-backed stablecoin with three structural differences from USDC and USDT:
1. Revenue Sharing Reserve income — generated by investing backing assets in short-term Treasuries and money-market instruments — is distributed to consortium partners after a small management fee. This contrasts with Circle, which retained the vast majority of its $1.7B in 2024 reserve income (99% of total revenue).
2. Zero-Fee Minting and Redemption No fees on issuance or redemption, with no artificial limits on volume. Circle charges fees to large institutional minters; Tether charges a minimum $1,000 fee per redemption.
3. Consortium Governance Partners have board-level influence over the stablecoin's roadmap, reserve composition, and fee structure. This addresses the principal-agent problem in which distribution partners (like Coinbase, which distributes USDC) bear market-making costs while the issuer captures reserve economics.
Deployment timeline: OUSD is expected to launch natively on Solana first, with multi-chain expansion planned. No firm general-availability date has been set beyond "later in 2026."
Regulatory posture: Open Standard appears positioned to comply with the GENIUS Act's stablecoin framework, whose rulemaking deadline landed July 18, 2026, when six federal agencies finalized capital, reserve, and licensing rules.
On July 16, 2026, Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP) — an enterprise system for minting, moving, and managing stablecoins. According to Visa's head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, VSP is designed as "the best way to access and use Open USD."
Platform capabilities:
Scale: Visa processes approximately $15 trillion in annual payment volume. Its network connects 15,000 financial institutions and over 200 million merchants globally. According to Fortune, VSP aims to provide stablecoin services to this entire merchant base.
Current status: Beta with select institutional clients. Visa reported an existing $7 billion annualized stablecoin settlement run rate from pilot programs. The platform also supports USDC and USDG alongside OUSD.
Strategic logic: Visa is positioning itself as the managed infrastructure layer between public blockchains and institutional clients — absorbing blockchain complexity so banks deploy stablecoin products without building custody, wallet, and compliance tooling from scratch.
The Open Standard announcement triggered immediate repricing of Circle's equity:
Stock price reaction:
Analyst downgrades:
Bull case (William Blair, Clear Street): The sell-off was termed "overblown," citing Circle's first-mover advantage, deep liquidity ($73.8B supply), existing payments infrastructure, and regulatory head start. Clear Street noted that "without any solid evidence that OUSD can get real traction, the selloff looks overdone."
Fundamental vulnerability: Circle's revenue is approximately 99% dependent on reserve interest income. In 2024, this generated approximately $1.7 billion. If Circle is forced to share even 30-40% of reserve income with distribution partners to match OUSD's economics, annual revenue impact would be $500-680 million.
Additionally, Mizuho flagged that Coinbase's revenue-sharing agreement with Circle — reportedly worth hundreds of millions annually — is up for renewal, creating a secondary pressure point.
The $313 billion stablecoin market (as of mid-July 2026) remains heavily concentrated:
| Stablecoin | Market Cap | Share | |------------|-----------|-------| | USDT (Tether) | $184B | ~59% | | USDC (Circle) | $73.8B | ~24% | | All Others | $55.2B | ~17% |
Volume dynamics: USDC leads in annual transaction volume ($18.3T in 2025) despite USDT's larger supply, reflecting USDC's institutional adoption. USDT dominates on-chain trading volume at approximately 74%.
Regulatory shifts: MiCA's transition period ended July 1, 2026, with no extensions — Coinbase, Kraken, Crypto.com, and Binance's EU entity delisted or restricted USDT spot trading for EU users. The GENIUS Act rulemaking deadline on July 18 finalized US capital and reserve requirements. Both regulatory frameworks favor compliant, transparent issuers.
Competitive landscape in 2026:
Open Standard's model represents a structural reallocation of economic value in stablecoin markets. Under the current regime:
Current value distribution (USDC model):
Open USD proposed value distribution:
The shift is from a monopoly-issuer model to a cooperative-utility model. If OUSD achieves meaningful scale, it sets a pricing floor: any stablecoin issuer retaining 99% of reserve income becomes economically uncompetitive for distribution partners who can instead join the consortium.
This creates a classic two-sided network effect: merchants adopt OUSD because Visa/Mastercard/Stripe integrate it; institutions adopt it because BlackRock/BNY provide custody and reserve management; crypto platforms adopt it because Coinbase/OKX/Bybit list it natively.
The open question: whether 140 partners with competing interests can coordinate effectively, or whether governance complexity produces the same bureaucratic friction that plagues legacy payment standards bodies.
Open Standard represents the most significant structural challenge to the stablecoin duopoly since Tether's rise in 2017-2019. The threat is not technological — dollar-backed stablecoins are commodity products. The threat is economic: OUSD's revenue-sharing model exposes the extractive economics of single-issuer stablecoins by offering distribution partners a direct stake in reserve income.
The consortium's member list reads as a who's-who of global payment infrastructure. If even a fraction of Visa's $15 trillion annual volume migrates to stablecoin rails through VSP, OUSD's network effects could compound rapidly.
For Circle, the strategic dilemma is immediate: maintain high margins and risk partner defection to OUSD, or compress margins proactively to retain distribution — either path reduces earnings. Mizuho's 25% cut to consensus EBITDA may prove conservative if OUSD achieves meaningful adoption in 2027.
The stablecoin market is transitioning from a phase of issuer-captured economics to one of distributed value — mirroring the broader pattern observed across blockchain infrastructure where monopoly rents face compression from open protocols and consortium models.