Open USD Launches With Visa, Stripe, and BlackRock — and Puts Circle's Float in the Crosshairs
The announcement reads like a customer roster for the entire global payments industry. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, Ripple — more than 140 firms lined up behind a single dollar token before it has settled a single transaction. Open USD does not exist yet; it is expected to go live later in 2026. What launched on June 30 was not a product. It was a coalition.
That distinction is the whole story.
The Model, Not the Token
Existing stablecoins are simple businesses wearing complicated clothing. A holder sends dollars, the issuer mints tokens, and the issuer parks the dollars in short-dated Treasuries earning four to five percent. On a float measured in the hundreds of billions, that spread is the entire profit engine. Tether and Circle together control roughly 87 percent of the market — about 62 and 25 percent respectively — and both keep the interest. The token is free to hold. The reserves are where the money is.
Open USD inverts the arrangement. Minting and redemption carry no fee and no volume cap, and nearly all of the reserve income flows back to the partners that drive adoption, minus a management fee to cover operations. The issuer stops being the party that pockets the float. The distributor becomes it.
The founding chief executive is Zach Abrams, co-founder of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Stripe acquired last year. The independent-company framing is real, but the strategic hand behind it is not hard to read.
Why Circle Fell
Circle’s stock dropped as much as 15 percent on the announcement, trading near $66. The market was not reacting to a competing token. It was repricing the durability of float capture itself. If Stripe makes Open USD the default for its merchants, if Visa routes settlement through it, if Shopify and Coinbase embed it, then the interest that would have accrued to Circle instead accrues to the platforms that own the customer relationship. USDC does not lose on technology. It loses on distribution, because the firms that control checkout have decided to keep the yield for themselves.
The Regulatory Seam
The design is not an accident of generosity. The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, bars stablecoin issuers from paying yield to holders — the provision that keeps these tokens classified as payment instruments rather than securities. Open USD does not pay holders. It pays partners. Reserve income routed to distributing businesses rather than to the wallets holding the coin threads the needle precisely: the economics are shared, but the holder still earns nothing directly. The consortium found the seam in the statute and built a business inside it.
A Network, Not an Issuer
Structurally, Open Standard resembles Visa or Mastercard more than it resembles Tether. It is an independent company governed by a board of its own partners, built to serve the collective rather than a single shareholder. That is the pitch, and it is a strong one — mutualized infrastructure owned by the institutions that use it. It is also the weakness. A 140-member coalition is easy to assemble around a press release and hard to steer once partners with competing payment franchises must agree on roadmap, pricing, and who sits on the board. Consortium stablecoins are not new. Paxos built USDG on the same premise with Robinhood and Kraken, and it displaced no one. Coalitions announce well. They govern slowly.
The Bet
Tether’s Paolo Ardoino greeted the launch as player two entering the game. The framing is wrong. Open USD is not a second player in the same game. It is an argument that the game was never about issuing the best dollar. Circle built a company on the premise that whoever holds the reserves keeps the interest. Open USD is a bet, backed by most of the payments industry, that the interest was never theirs to keep.