A new stablecoin issuer backed by some of the biggest names in payments has picked a fight with the two companies that dominate the digital dollar market. The Open USD stablecoin launch went live on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, putting Open Standard’s token, OUSD, directly into a market long ruled by Tether and Circle — but with a structure that spreads ownership far wider than either of its rivals ever has.
Key takeaways
- Open USD (OUSD) launched on Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo blockchains on September 30, 2026, after being first unveiled in June.
- Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa are Open Standard’s five founding partners, each holding an equal initial equity stake and together committing more than $1 billion to OUSD liquidity.
- Equity will largely be distributed over the next 4-5 years based on how much partners grow OUSD’s supply and transaction activity, not on a fixed revenue share.
- Open Standard’s wider partner network has grown from over 140 to more than 200 companies, with UBS, SBI Holdings and Jeeves among the newest additions.
- The stablecoin market Open USD is entering is worth over $300 billion, with Tether’s USDT at roughly $143 billion and Circle’s USDC at about $74 billion.
Open USD Goes Live Across Four Blockchains
Open USD is now live on Ethereum, Solana, Coinbase’s Base, and Stripe-backed Tempo, according to Open Standard CEO Zach Abrams, who spoke to CoinDesk about the rollout. The token first surfaced in June as a concept; the actual launch of the Open USD stablecoin marks the moment it becomes usable infrastructure rather than an announcement.
Before this venture, Abrams co-founded and ran Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company that Stripe bought for $1.1 billion in 2024, a history that colors his vision for Open USD’s ambitions. “We want to be the most useful stablecoin, the same way the U.S. dollar is useful,” he said. “Every other stablecoin is building a fund. We’re building money.”
That distinction matters. Stablecoin issuers typically earn interest on the cash and securities backing their tokens, turning the business into something closer to a money-market fund with a crypto wrapper. Abrams is positioning Open USD instead as a payments rail meant to disappear into everyday financial plumbing. “When are stablecoins successful? It’s when they recede into the background and just become a core part of your mom’s bank account,” he said.
Five Founding Partners, One Equal Stake Each
Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa are Open Standard’s first five founding partners, and each holds an equal initial equity stake in the company. Together, the group has committed more than $1 billion to build out OUSD liquidity over the coming months. The size of each individual investment and equity percentage was not disclosed.
The setup is a sharp narrowing from where Open Standard started. Launched in June, the initiative debuted with a roster of over 140 partners across the payments, banking, crypto and technology sectors, among them BlackRock, BNY and Standard Chartered. Circle was unsettled by that early announcement, as investors feared that key USDC allies — including Coinbase, Visa and Mastercard — were secretly aligning with a competing digital dollar. Some analysts questioned at the time what those partnerships actually meant in practice, and whether a consortium involving so many companies, some of them direct competitors, could make decisions effectively.
Abrams rejects the consortium label outright. According to him, while Open Standard does have corporate backers, its executives handle daily operations directly rather than funneling choices through a panel representing hundreds of members. Ownership and governance rest with a tighter group of founding partners, whereas the wider network of more than 200 participants is incentivized through rewards linked to their actual usage of OUSD.
Plans to expand founding group and form a board
At present, Open Standard’s investor base consists solely of its five founding firms, though Abrams anticipates this number expanding to somewhere between 10 and 12 companies over time. The company also intends to form a founder-composed board of directors, introducing a more structured governance framework as ownership becomes more distributed.
Equity Tied to Usage, Not Just Revenue
Open Standard diverges from the current practices of Tether and Circle in its economic design. Tether retains the bulk of interest earned on USDT reserves, whereas Circle allocates a share of USDC reserve revenue to distribution partners such as Coinbase. Open Standard aims to place that revenue-sharing arrangement at the core of its business model instead of treating it as secondary.
According to Abrams, founding partners receive no preferential revenue share under this structure. They instead earn rewards based on the OUSD supply they help create, following the same rules that apply to all network partners. He noted that the “overwhelming majority” of Open Standard’s equity will be allocated over the coming 4-5 years to both founders and non-founding partners, in proportion to their contribution to network growth.
“The overwhelming majority of our cap table is going to be distributed back to founders and non-founders based on how they help grow the network,” Abrams said. To qualify, partners must meet a minimum threshold, earning equity through a mix of OUSD supply and transaction volume — a design intended to encourage active use of the token rather than passive holding on a balance sheet. Open Standard declined to reveal the exact threshold required of partners.
Open Standard isn’t alone in pursuing this collectively owned approach. Qivalis, supported by 37 European banks, is developing a comparable euro-denominated stablecoin, and a group of 21 financial institutions — including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs and UBS — is establishing its own venture to issue stablecoins for payment and digital asset use cases. Open Standard is wagering that distributing ownership and financial upside among a broader base of participants fosters stronger adoption than a single issuer retaining all reserve earnings.
Market Position and Growth Ambitions
Open USD is entering a stablecoin sector exceeding $300 billion in value, a market still dominated by just two issuers: Tether’s USDT, circulating at about $143 billion, and Circle’s USDC, at roughly $74 billion. Competing against that kind of entrenched liquidity is the core challenge facing any new entrant, and it’s the backdrop against which Open Standard’s wider partner network and fee structure need to be read.
Use cases and partner network growth
Abrams said OUSD is built for banking, cross-border payments, card settlement, institutional trading and lending — a broader use-case list than most stablecoins target out of the gate. Having started with more than 140 companies back in June, the firm’s partner network has since expanded beyond 200, recently welcoming Japan’s SBI Holdings, Swiss bank UBS and fintech Jeeves.
Tempo’s liquidity projections and fee elimination
Open USD will eliminate minting and burning fees, a change Tempo chief business officer Dan Romero said could deliver meaningful savings for companies moving large sums in and out of stablecoins. Specifically for Tempo, Romero outlined a bold liquidity growth plan: about $1 billion in OUSD within a few months, surpassing $10 billion sometime in 2027, and possibly topping $100 billion within a few years. While Open Standard intends to launch OUSD on several blockchains, Tempo is positioned to become its primary source of liquidity.
Beyond the dollar
Abrams said Open Standard is already fielding demand for stablecoins denominated in currencies other than the dollar. He pointed to Bridge’s earlier work issuing a euro-backed token for Revolut as evidence of that appetite among financial firms. “It’s purely going to be driven by demands from the network, and I can tell you the network already demands other stablecoins,” he said. Looking a decade out, Abrams said he wants Open USD’s rails to eventually handle “hundreds of trillions of dollars a year” as stablecoins become embedded in how money moves globally.
Whether that scale materializes will depend on something Open Standard can’t fully control: whether its partners actually put OUSD to work rather than treating their equal stakes as a passive bet. The model rewards activity over ownership on paper, which means the real test of the Open USD stablecoin launch won’t be Wednesday’s go-live — it will be how much of that $1 billion in committed liquidity actually turns into daily transaction volume against USDT and USDC’s head start.
Article produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the editorial team.
