Image Credit: Shutterstock
Key Takeaways
- Open USD launched across four blockchains with Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa as founding partners, each holding an equal initial equity stake.
- Unlike Tether and Circle, Open Standard ties partner rewards to OUSD supply and transaction activity rather than a fixed share of reserve income.
- Tempo’s Dan Romero expects roughly $1 billion in OUSD on its platform within months, growing past $10 billion during 2027.
Open Standard launched its Open USD stablecoin on Wednesday across Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo, entering a market still dominated by Tether and Circle with a structure designed to spread ownership and economic rewards across the companies that distribute and use the token rather than concentrating them with a single issuer.
A Different Ownership Model From the Start
Open Standard Chief Executive Zach Abrams, who previously co-founded and led stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge before Stripe acquired it for $1.1 billion in 2024, said the company’s goal is for Open USD to function as genuinely useful money rather than a yield product.
“Every other stablecoin is building a fund. We’re building money.”
Open USD enters a stablecoin market worth more than $300 billion, still led by Tether’s USDT at about $143 billion in circulation and Circle’s USDC at roughly $74 billion.
Abrams said the token is designed specifically for banking, cross-border payments, card settlement, institutional trading and lending, with an economic model built to reward the companies driving supply and transaction activity rather than paying a fixed share of reserve income to a narrow set of partners.
From 140 Partners to Five Founders With Equal Stakes
Open Standard first emerged publicly in June with more than 140 partners spanning payments, banking and crypto, including BlackRock, BNY and Standard Chartered.
That initial announcement unsettled Circle’s stock at the time, as markets weighed whether major USDC partners such as Coinbase, Visa and Mastercard were lining up behind a competing dollar token, though some analysts later questioned what the loose partnership structure meant in practice given the number of competing companies involved.
Abrams rejected the characterization of Open Standard as a consortium, saying the company’s management runs day-to-day decisions rather than routing them through a committee of participants.
Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa became the company’s first five founding partners and investors, each receiving an equal initial equity stake and together committing more than $1 billion to establish OUSD liquidity over the coming months. The specific size of each company’s individual investment was not disclosed.
Abrams said he expects the founding group to eventually grow to roughly 10 to 12 companies, with a board of directors composed of founders still to be established. The company’s broader partner network, meanwhile, has expanded to more than 200 companies, with Japan’s SBI Holdings, Swiss bank UBS and fintech Jeeves among the most recent additions.
Equity Tied to Usage, Not a Flat Revenue Share
Stablecoin issuers typically earn interest income from the cash and securities backing their tokens; Tether retains most of that income itself, while Circle shares a portion of USDC reserve revenue with distribution partners like Coinbase.
Open Standard is taking a different approach, declining to give founding partners a special share of revenue and instead tying rewards to how much OUSD supply and transaction volume a partner generates, under the same framework that applies to non-founding partners.
Abrams said the bulk of Open Standard’s equity is intended to be distributed over the next four to five years to founders and network partners based on their contributions to the network’s growth, rather than remaining concentrated with the company’s initial backers.
Partners that meet an undisclosed minimum threshold can earn equity based on a combination of OUSD supply and transaction activity, an incentive structure meant to reward active use of the token rather than passive holding.
Part of a Broader Wave of Bank-Backed Stablecoins
Open Standard’s jointly backed model reflects a broader trend among financial institutions experimenting with shared stablecoin ownership rather than issuing tokens independently.
Qivalis, backed by 37 European banks, is developing a euro-denominated stablecoin, and a separate group of 21 institutions including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs and UBS has said it plans to form a company to issue stablecoins for payments and digital asset transactions.
Dan Romero, chief business officer at Tempo, said in an interview that Open USD will eliminate minting and burning fees, a change he said could represent meaningful savings for companies moving large volumes of money in and out of stablecoins.
“We see a path to roughly $1 billion of OUSD on Tempo within the next few months.”
Romero said he expects that figure to grow past $10 billion during 2027 and potentially exceed $100 billion over the following several years, with Tempo competing to become Open USD’s deepest liquidity pool even as the token launches across multiple blockchains simultaneously.
Currencies Beyond the Dollar May Follow
Abrams said Open Standard is already seeing demand for stablecoins denominated in currencies other than the dollar, pointing to Bridge’s prior launch of a euro-backed token for Revolut as evidence of broader appetite among financial firms for non-dollar stablecoins. He said:
“Open Standard’s eventual currency lineup would be driven by demand from its own partner network rather than a predetermined roadmap.”
Looking further ahead, Abrams said he wants Open USD’s infrastructure to eventually support hundreds of trillions of dollars in annual transaction volume as stablecoins become a standard part of how money moves globally, a long-term ambition that remains aspirational rather than tied to any specific near-term target.
