140+ Giants Including Visa and Mastercard Unite to Launch Open USD Stablecoin
A massive corporate alliance has taken direct aim at the stablecoin industry's dominant players. More than 140 companies — including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and Coinbase — have jointly unveiled Open Standard and its flagship product, Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-pegged stablecoin designed to fundamentally alter how value is distributed across the $300 billion stablecoin market.
At the helm of the initiative is Zach Abrams, co-founder of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe purchased back in 2024. Abrams described the reasoning behind the project in straightforward terms: current stablecoin solutions, while capable, fall short when businesses need something that is open, affordable, high-throughput, and genuinely aligned with their commercial interests.
Markets responded immediately. Shares of Circle dropped by as much as 15% following the announcement — a clear signal that investors understood exactly which business model Open USD is targeting.
The economic structure of OUSD sets it apart from incumbents like Circle's USDC and Tether's USDT. Both of those issuers collect interest by investing stablecoin reserves into short-term U.S. Treasury instruments, keeping the yield for themselves. USDC currently holds a market cap near $73 billion, while USDT sits at roughly $145 billion. Open USD flips this arrangement: there are no minting fees, no redemption fees, no volume caps, and the majority of interest earned on reserves flows back to the companies distributing and using the stablecoin — with only a management fee retained by Open Standard itself.
Governance follows a decentralized logic as well. Rather than placing control in the hands of a single issuing entity, Open Standard will be administered by an independent organization where decision-making authority is shared among partner companies.
The roster of backers spans nearly every segment of global finance. Payment networks represented include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. Banking partners include BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, and U.S. Bank. Technology giants such as Google, Shopify, and IBM are on board. The crypto side features Coinbase, Ripple, MetaMask, Aave, Bybit, OKX, Galaxy, Fireblocks, and Anchorage Digital, among others.
Visa's head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, publicly confirmed the company's involvement on X, noting that over 100 initial partners have signed on with the shared mission of issuing Open USD at scale.
On the technical side, OUSD is expected to go live later in 2026 across four blockchain networks: Solana, Stellar, Base, and Polygon. Tempo CEO Matt Huang confirmed that the token will be natively issued on Tempo's network from launch, with built-in support for payments, liquidity provision, exchanges, and decentralized finance applications.
This is not the first time a consortium has attempted this yield-sharing model. Paxos leads the Global Dollar Network (USDG) — backed by Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy Digital — on an identical premise. Meanwhile, in Europe, 37 banks and payment providers have rallied around Qivalis, a euro-denominated stablecoin, reflecting growing institutional resistance to U.S. dollar dominance in digital asset infrastructure.
The timing of Open USD's launch is deliberate. Stablecoins have steadily evolved beyond their crypto-trading origins, increasingly powering cross-border payments, merchant settlements, and corporate treasury management. Citi projects the overall stablecoin market could reach $4 trillion by 2030 — a figure that explains why so many of the world's largest financial institutions are willing to challenge the status quo.
