Rivals rarely climb into bed together, and they almost never agree to share a currency. Yet more than 140 companies that spend most days fighting for the same customers have just done both.
Open Standard confirmed the move on 30 June 2026, launching Open USD, or OUSD, and pitching it as neutral infrastructure for payments, trading and the wider internet economy rather than any single company’s product. Visa, Mastercard and Google sit among the founding backers, with Fireblocks on board as a key infrastructure partner. The fuller roster stretches across traditional payments and crypto native firms, including Stripe, American Express, Coinbase, BlackRock, BNY, IBM and DoorDash.
The design is what sets OUSD apart. The token charges nothing to mint or redeem at any scale, and returns nearly all of its reserve income to the partners that distribute it rather than keeping it as issuer profit. Governance sits with a board drawn from those same partner companies rather than a single controlling entity. Zach Abrams, the Bridge co-founder installed as Open Standard’s founding chief executive, framed it plainly at launch. “It’s a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it,” he said.
Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Abrams previously built, was bought by Stripe for roughly a billion dollars in 2024, which makes him an unusually well credentialled operator to steer a coalition this large. OUSD is expected to go live later this year, with Solana confirmed as a day one network and Stellar, Base and Polygon set to follow.
Markets reacted within hours. Circle’s shares fell as much as 18% on the announcement, as investors weighed the threat to USDC’s core revenue, the interest earned on the treasuries backing its reserves. Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire pushed back publicly, arguing that USDC’s liquidity, regulatory track record and years of operating history are not easily replicated by a brand new entrant, and questioning whether fee free minting at scale is sustainable.
Not everyone is convinced OUSD can pull off its own pitch either. Will Harborne, co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Rhino.fi, has warned that a shared standard creates friction of its own once businesses start actually using it, rather than just backing it on paper. “For consumer facing businesses, that’s where the friction bites first,” he told CCN, pointing to the confusion of payments sent in one stablecoin and received in another.
ARK Invest’s Lorenzo Valente has raised a related concern, questioning whether a consortium of roughly 500 competing entities can move quickly enough, given a cold start liquidity problem and thin trading pairs. History offers a caution too. USDC currently holds around seventy three billion dollars in supply, against roughly three billion for USDG, the earlier consortium coin that pioneered yield sharing eighteen months ago.
No US regulator has commented on OUSD by name so far, which is not surprising for an eleven day old announcement with no live product. But there is a genuine open legal question sitting underneath the launch. The GENIUS Act bars payment stablecoin issuers from paying yield to token holders, and the OCC’s proposed rule implementing that ban, published in February, extends the prohibition to arrangements where an issuer routes yield through affiliated third parties.
OUSD’s entire model depends on sharing reserve income with 140 partner companies, precisely the kind of arrangement that rule appears to target, though the OCC has carved out an exemption for white label profit sharing with non-affiliated partners that Open Standard may lean on. Final rules are due by 18th July.
Whichever way that question resolves, OUSD has already done something no rival coin managed. It got Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase to agree, however briefly, that this dollar is nobody’s dollar and everybody’s.