Aconsortium of more than 140 financial and technology companies, among them Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase, launched a new dollar-pegged stablecoin on Tuesday called Open USD.
The venture, run by an independent company named Open Standard, is a direct swipe at the economics that have made Circle and Tether the dominant issuers in the sector.
Open USD, which trades under the ticker OUSD, is designed so that businesses can mint and redeem the token at no cost and with no caps on volume.
The bigger departure sits in the reserves. Nearly all of the interest earned on the assets backing OUSD will flow to partners after a management fee, rather than to a single issuer.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
That structure attacks the core of the incumbent model. Reserve income, the interest banks pay on the cash and Treasuries held against a stablecoin, generated the overwhelming majority of Circle’s revenue last year.
The roster of backers reads like a cross-section of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Ripple, Google and Shopify are all named as founding partners.
Zach Abrams, co-founder and chief executive of the Stripe-owned infrastructure firm Bridge, will serve as Open Standard’s founding CEO.
“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,” Abrams said in the launch statement.
The board of Open Standard is made up of the consortium’s partners, a governance model the group frames as collective rather than controlled by one company.
Markets read the launch as a threat almost immediately. Circle shares fell sharply on the day of the announcement, with several outlets reporting a drop of between 15 and 17 per cent.
Part of the sting is that some of OUSD’s backers, including BlackRock and BNY, are also core partners in Circle’s own ecosystem. The new venture effectively pulls familiar institutional names onto a rival platform.
The competitive maths is steep, though. Tether’s USDT accounted for roughly 62 per cent of the stablecoin market in April, with Circle’s USDC holding around 25 per cent, per data cited from CoinDesk.
Analysts were quick to caution that the sell-off may have run ahead of reality. One Ark Invest researcher publicly doubted that Open USD could unseat Circle, arguing the incumbent’s distribution advantages are hard to replicate.
The launch also lands in a very different regulatory climate. The GENIUS Act, signed into US law in July 2025, established a federal framework for payment stablecoins and has since opened the floodgates to new entrants.
That framework is why the sector now looks less like a crypto sideshow and more like a fight for the plumbing of corporate payments. The involvement of the two largest card networks underlines how seriously the establishment is taking it.
For Visa and Mastercard, the move fits a broader pattern of hedging. Mastercard’s recent acquisition of stablecoin firm BVNK for up to $1.8bn signalled how far the networks are willing to go to own a slice of tokenised settlement.
The wider institutional land grab is well under way, from banks probing the trust gap with big tech to Wall Street’s race to tokenise, exemplified by JPMorgan’s tokenised money-market fund on Ethereum.
Open Standard has not committed to a firm launch date beyond 2026, and the token is expected to go live later in the year.
Whether OUSD becomes a genuine third force or simply a bargaining chip against Circle’s pricing, the message from the consortium is blunt. The most profitable part of the stablecoin business, the reserve float, is now openly contested.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.