Open USD: The 140-Company Consortium Rewriting the Stablecoin Playbook
On 30 June 2026, a consortium of more than 140 companies — including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Standard Chartered, Google, and Coinbase — announced the formation of Open Standard, a governance entity that will issue a new US dollar stablecoin called Open USD (OUSD). The initiative represents the most ambitious corporate-backed challenge yet to Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC), which together control roughly 87% of the $290 billion global stablecoin market.
Unlike existing stablecoins where a single issuer captures all reserve revenue, OUSD's defining feature is revenue sharing: the interest earned on reserve assets backing the stablecoin — primarily short-dated US Treasuries and high-quality liquid assets — will be redistributed to participating businesses, minus a small management fee. Businesses that join the consortium can mint and redeem OUSD without fees or volume limits.
Who's Behind Open USD
The consortium spans three sectors: payments (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe), traditional finance (BlackRock, Standard Chartered, US Bank), and technology/crypto (Google, Coinbase, and dozens of fintech and blockchain infrastructure providers). Noticeably absent are Tether and Circle, the two incumbents that the new initiative aims to displace.
Open Standard is led by interim CEO Zach Abrams, co-founder of the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, which Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2025. The Bridge acquisition — one of crypto's largest — gave Stripe the technical stack to build its stablecoin payments offering, and Abrams now brings that expertise to the consortium effort.
A Governance Model Built for Scale
Open Standard is structured as an independent organisation with governance shared among its partner firms. This marks a departure from the centralised model of Tether and Circle, where a single company controls issuance, reserves, and key decisions. Open Standard describes OUSD as a "stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it."
The governance model addresses a structural tension in the stablecoin market: when one entity captures all reserve interest, the economic incentive to onboard partners is weak. By sharing revenue, Open Standard creates a network effect — more adoption means more reserve income, which flows back to participants and incentivises further adoption.
Open Standard has not yet disclosed which blockchain OUSD will operate on. But Stripe's existing stablecoin infrastructure — built on the Tempo blockchain it launched with Paradigm in September 2025 — is one possible candidate.
Why it matters: This is the first time a consortium of global payment networks and asset managers has jointly launched a stablecoin. The combined market power of Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BlackRock gives OUSD a distribution channel that no crypto-native stablecoin has ever had — direct access to the world's payment rails.
The Regulatory Tailwind
Open USD arrives in a transformed regulatory landscape. The GENIUS Act, signed into law by President Trump in July 2025, established a federal licensing framework for stablecoin issuers in the United States. This removed the legal uncertainty that previously kept major financial institutions on the sidelines.
Since GENIUS passed, corporate stablecoin activity has accelerated: Klarna launched KlarnaUSD in November 2025; Amazon and Walmart have publicly expressed interest in issuing their own stablecoins; and just weeks before the OUSD announcement, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and others unveiled The Clearing House initiative — a bank-led network for tokenised deposits moving on blockchain-style rails.
Market Impact and Reaction
Circle's stock fell 13% on the announcement, trading at $66 per share — a signal that markets view OUSD as a credible threat. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire struck a diplomatic tone, writing on X: "We welcome continued innovation and competition in the space." Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino was more succinct: "Welcome OUSD. Player 2 has entered the game."
The stablecoin market has been waiting for a breakout — something that moves beyond crypto-native audiences into mainstream commerce. With Visa and Mastercard as launch partners, OUSD has a plausible path to that outcome. The question is execution: can 140 partners — each with their own commercial interests — sustain a coherent governance model? And can OUSD's reserve-sharing economics outcompete the massive liquidity moats that Tether and Circle have built over years?
What to Watch
Three things will determine whether OUSD becomes a genuine contender or a consortium footnote:
- Blockchain choice: The chain OUSD launches on will shape its speed, cost, and developer ecosystem. An Ethereum L2, Solana, or Stripe's Tempo are all plausible.
- Banking partners: Who holds the reserves? BlackRock's involvement suggests institutional-grade custody and asset management, but reserve transparency will be scrutinised.
- Merchant adoption: The consortium's real test is whether businesses actually use OUSD for payments, not just hold it as a treasury asset.
One thing is certain: the stablecoin market just got a lot more interesting.