Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and 140+ firms launch Open USD, a yield-sharing stablecoin that challenges Circle and reshapes the $300 billion market.
A coalition of more than 140 companies – Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, and Coinbase among them – announced Tuesday the formation of Open Standard and the launch of Open USD (OUSD), a 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 firm Stripe acquired in 2024.
“Existing stablecoins have great strengths,” Abrams said in a statement. “But to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests.”
The announcement sent Circle shares down as much as 15% Tuesday, a sign of how directly Open USD targets the USDC issuer’s business model.
The core proposition: no minting fees, no redemption fees, no volume limits – and most of the interest generated by the stablecoin’s reserves goes to the companies using it, minus a management fee retained by Open Standard.
That reserve income is what makes Circle and Tether profitable. Both issuers park stablecoin backing in short-term U.S. Treasuries and keep the yield themselves. Circle’s USDC carries a market cap of roughly $73 billion; Tether’s USDT sits at around $145 billion. Open USD proposes to share that yield with its distribution network instead.
Governance follows the same logic. Rather than a single issuer calling the shots, Open Standard will be managed by an independent organization with decision-making shared among partner companies.
The partner list spans nearly every corner of finance. Payment networks include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. Banks include BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, and U.S. Bank. On the technology side: Google, Shopify, and IBM. Crypto firms include Coinbase, Ripple, MetaMask, Aave, Bybit, OKX, Galaxy, Fireblocks, and Anchorage Digital.
“Today, we announced Visa is joining Open Standard alongside Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, U.S. Bank, BBVA, Standard Chartered and 100-plus initial partners with the mission of issuing 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 OUSD will be natively 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: share reserve income, grow adoption.
In Europe, 37 banks and payment providers have organized around Qivalis, a euro-denominated stablecoin, as institutions push back against U.S. dollar dominance in the digital asset space.
The timing is not accidental. Stablecoins have migrated out of crypto trading and into cross-border payments, merchant settlements, and corporate treasury operations. Citi projects the market will reach $4 trillion by 2030.
For Mastercard, the move deepens its bet on blockchain-based payments. The company has an Alpha Score of 65/100, reflecting moderate momentum in a sector where stablecoin infrastructure is becoming a competitive battleground.
Prepared with AlphaScala research tooling and grounded in primary market data: live prices, fundamentals, SEC filings, hedge-fund holdings, and insider activity. Each story is checked against AlphaScala publishing rules before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.