A coalition of more than 140 companies – among them Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock and Coinbase – today announced the formation of the Open Standard and the launch of Open USD (OUSD), a new dollar-pegged stablecoin built to redistribute the economics of the $300 billion stablecoin market.
The project is led by Zach Abrams, co-founder of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company that Stripe acquired in 2024.
“Existing stablecoins have great strengths,” Abrams said in a statement, “But to use them at scale, companies need something that’s open, cheap, high-throughput, widely available, and tailored to their interests.”
The announcement sent Circle shares down as much as 15% on Tuesday, a sign of how directly Open USD is targeting the USDC issuer’s business model.
The core proposition of Open USD is straightforward: no minting fees, no redemption fees, no volume limits – and most of the interest generated by the stablecoin’s reserves goes to the companies that use it, minus an administration fee retained by the Open Standard.
That spare income is what makes Circle and Tether profitable. Both issuers park stablecoin backing in short-term US Treasuries and keep the dividends themselves. Circle’s USDC has a market capitalization of about $73 billion; Tether’s USDT is around $145 billion. Open USD instead proposes to share this dividend with its distribution network.
Governance follows the same logic. Instead of a single issuer doing it, the Open Standard will be governed by an independent organization where decision-making is shared between partner companies.
Who supports Open USD
The partner list spans almost every corner of the economy. Payment networks include Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover. Banks include BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS and US Bank. On the technology side: Google, Shopify and IBM. Crypto companies include Coinbase, Ripple, MetaMask, Aave, Bybit, OKX, Galaxy, Fireblocks and Anchorage Digital.
“Today we announced that Visa is joining Open Standard along with Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, US Bank, BBVA, Standard Chartered and over 100 initial partners with the mission to issue Open USD,” Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, wrote on X.
Open USD is expected to go live later in 2026 on Solana, Stellar, Base and Polygon. Tempo CEO Matt Huang confirmed that OUSD will be issued on its network from day one with support for payments, liquidity, exchanges and DeFi.
Open Standard is not the first consortium to try this model. Paxos leads the Global Dollar Network (USDG) – backed by Robinhood, Kraken and Galaxy Digital – on the same premise: equity reserve income, adoption growth.
In Europe, 37 banks and payment providers have organized around Qivalis, a euro-denominated stablecoin, as institutions push back against the dominance of the US dollar in the digital asset space.
The timing is not accidental. Stablecoins have migrated out of crypto trading and into cross-border payments, trade settlements and corporate treasury operations.
Citi expects the market to reach $4 trillion by 2030.