Key Points
- A consortium of 140-plus firms unveiled Open USD, a dollar stablecoin, on June 30.
- Backers include Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, BlackRock and BNY.
- Open USD shares reserve revenue with partners and charges no mint or redemption fees.
- Circle shares fell more than 17% as the rival network was announced.
A consortium of more than 140 financial and technology companies unveiled Open USD on June 30, a dollar stablecoin built to challenge market leaders Circle and Tether, CoinDesk reported. Backers include Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Coinbase, BlackRock, BNY, Google, and Shopify.
The token, ticker OUSD, will be operated by Open Standard, an independent company governed by its partners rather than a single issuer, and is set to launch later this year. Businesses can mint and redeem it with no fees or volume caps, and partners keep nearly all of the revenue generated on the token's reserves after a management fee. Zach Abrams, co-founder of the Stripe-owned firm Bridge, is founding and interim CEO; Shopify will let its merchants accept Open USD at checkout.
The threat is the business model, not the technology. Circle and Tether keep most of the interest their reserves earn; Open USD hands it back to the distributors — which is why Coinbase, Circle's largest partner, is helping lead a competitor. A year after the Genius Act legalized stablecoins, the fight has moved from legitimacy to economics, and Circle shares fell more than 17% on the news. The caution is history: consortium stablecoins have a graveyard — Facebook's Libra folded in 2022, and Paxos's USDG has drawn only about $3 billion — leaving the hard part, real demand beyond crypto trading, still to be proven even as the sector keeps minting newly public companies.
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