Open USD lets the old monetary system step in.

Author: ‘Hua’ ‘Hu Yilin’ Source: X, @epr510

Introduction

The arrival of Open USD shifts the stablecoin competition from a market scramble among crypto startups to a fight over foundational infrastructure in which traditional finance, payment networks, technology platforms, and public-chain ecosystems all participate. Around this new alliance involving more than 140 institutions, scholar Hu Yilin argues that stablecoins are not the “moderate wing” of a crypto revolution—they are more like a “reformist loyalist faction” inside the old money system: they inherit the efficiency of blockchains while preserving the central position of the dollar and the Federal Reserve. The real crypto revolution, ultimately, still has to return to a more fundamental question: Does market life have to rely on central banks as the center of monetary order?

Open USD Debuts: Stablecoins Move from Product Competition to Alliance Infrastructure

On June 30, Open Standard announced the launch of Open USD, a dollar stablecoin designed for global capital flows. According to the official description, Open USD focuses on three design pillars: businesses can mint and redeem at zero cost; reserve yields are distributed to partners after deducting a small management fee; and it is operated by Open Standard, an independent company, with governance involving a board of directors comprised of partners. The list of participating entities spans payments, banking, technology, and the crypto industry, including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, OCBC, Google, Shopify, Coinbase, Solana, Base, Ripple, MetaMask, Aave, and others.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Open USD plans to be available on networks such as Base and Solana later this year, with about 140 companies already signed up to use it. The report also noted that USDT and USDC remain the two largest stablecoins today, with a combined market capitalization of approximately $260 billion. Barron’s observed that after Open USD was announced, shares of related companies such as Circle and Coinbase faced pressure, because the new alliance directly threatens the stablecoin business model where USDC is positioned.

On the surface, this looks like an escalation of competition in the stablecoin industry: more enterprises join, more channels gain access, and the reserve-yield distribution mechanism is redesigned. But in Hu Yilin’s view, Open USD’s more important significance is not how much market share it will take from USDC or USDT—it lies in what it reveals about the historical position of stablecoins themselves: stablecoins have not truly challenged the dollar standard; they simply make the dollar standard run more efficiently.

Stablecoins Are Not “Moderates,” They’re “Loyalists”

Hu Yilin supports the development of stablecoins because they directly touch fiat currencies and the banking system, forcing real-world political and economic structures to change. At the same time, he emphasizes that supporting stablecoins as a tool does not mean acknowledging stablecoins as the completed form of a crypto revolution.

Earlier, he compared stablecoins to the Tychonic system in the Copernican revolution: the Tychonic system absorbed many technical advantages from new astronomy and could explain more phenomena, so during the revolution it was easier for traditional authorities to accept; but it refused one most core point—letting the Earth move. Stablecoins are similar. They inherit blockchain’s settlement efficiency, programmability, global liquidity, and cross-border payment advantages, yet they refuse to take the dollar out of its central position.

When discussing Open USD, Hu Yilin further distinguishes between “moderates” and “loyalists.” He said, “I think someone like Michael Saylor counts as a ‘moderate.’ He also wants to be compatible with the old system, but he holds onto the core revolutionary point of the ‘Bitcoin standard.’” In other words, a Saylor-style path can accept listed companies, accounting standards, debt financing, capital-market frameworks, and regulatory structures—but it still regards Bitcoin as the new standard asset. It compromises with the old system, yet does not abandon the revolutionary core of “the emperor can be replaced.”

Stablecoins are different. Hu Yilin said, “Stablecoins certainly have historical significance, but they are not true revolutionaries.” In his view, stablecoins are more like reformers within the old regime—believing that “the emperor (the dollar, the Fed) is good, but the execution system below is bloated and inefficient; the Eastern Depot did a bad job before, and now it’s up to my Western Depot to improve it.”

This sharp metaphor points to stablecoins’ inherent limitation: they are not opposing the centrality of the dollar, but the inefficiency of the old payment system, bank clearing networks, cross-border transfer systems, and the efficiency of financial intermediaries. What they want to replace is the bureaucrats at the grassroots level, not the supreme authority.

Therefore, when the crypto revolution can only touch “execution systems” such as banks, payment companies, SWIFT, Visa, Alipay, and the like, stablecoins and more radical crypto routes appear aligned: both oppose the old financial system’s high cost, slowness, and lack of transparency. But once the issue reaches the dollar, U.S. Treasuries, the Federal Reserve, and the fiat-currency standard, differences between the two become clear. Hu Yilin said that stablecoins “stop the revolution from going deeper from the very beginning.” This does not mean stablecoins are meaningless in their progress; rather, their significance for progress has been confined within the old monetary order from the start.

When the Old System Takes the Stage, What’s Left for Stablecoin Entrepreneurs?

Open USD’s special aspect is that it is not a new coin launched by a single standalone crypto startup team, but an alliance-style project jointly involving payment companies, banks, technology platforms, asset management institutions, and public-chain ecosystem participants. Open Standard’s official emphasis is that it aims to give enterprises higher participation in stablecoin reserve yields, governance, and large-scale usage.

This is precisely what Hu Yilin considers Open USD’s symbolic significance. In the past, one core narrative of dollar stablecoins was that traditional finance was too slow, too expensive, and too closed—so crypto companies would use blockchain to improve efficiency. But now, traditional finance and payment giants are beginning to organize stablecoin networks themselves. The old system is no longer merely the object to be reformed; it has become the initiator and governance participant of stablecoin infrastructure.

Hu Yilin believes this creates an irony for native stablecoin companies like Circle: if the mission of stablecoins is to serve the dollar system, be compatible with the banking system, and improve payment efficiency, then when institutions such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Google, Coinbase, and others jointly launch their own stablecoin networks, the original stablecoin entrepreneurs will find it difficult to claim that they hold irreplaceable revolutionary legitimacy.

He frames the problem as a chain of questions: stablecoins are trying to revolutionize whom exactly? Is it SWIFT? What if interbank settlements also begin using stablecoins? Are they the payment networks like Visa or Alipay? And if they themselves also accept, issue, or participate in stablecoin networks?

In his view, if stablecoins’ goal were only to have the old system adopt blockchain payment technology, then once the old system adopts stablecoins, the stablecoin movement could declare success—and even “fade out with honors.” But if these native stablecoin companies still refuse to be absorbed, they must re-explain the fundamental difference between themselves and the old system.

“If you still feel unwilling, then you still have to go back to the path of decentralization, give up compromises, and continue the revolution,” Hu Yilin said.

Here, drawing a “line” is not necessarily limited to only one form. Hu Yilin does not require every project to follow a Bitcoin route. One can stick to a coin standard, stick to decentralized governance, stick to censorship resistance, and stick to self-custody, non-freezability, open protocols, and exit rights. But the key is that native crypto innovators must retain some genuinely “disobedient” part.

“The coin standard is of course the hardest core. You can emphasize governance structures, and you can emphasize censorship resistance too—but you have to emphasize something that’s heterodox, something that goes against the grain,” he said.

This remark highlights the awkwardness of the stablecoin narrative: when a project builds all its selling points on compliance, efficiency, low costs, institutional friendliness, and compatibility with old finance, it may ultimately not be disrupting the old system—but getting absorbed into it as a new department.

A Blockchain Upgrade Package for Dollar Hegemony

Hu Yilin agrees with a more macro assessment: the more successful dollar stablecoins are, it does not necessarily mean that crypto is more successful. It may instead mean that the dollar system is more successful.

If more and more global cross-border e-commerce, migrant remittances, on-chain transactions, RWAs, DeFi, and enterprise settlement increasingly use dollar stablecoins, then what may be weakened are local banking systems, traditional cross-border payment networks, and parts of capital controls—but what is strengthened remains dollar pricing, U.S. Treasury reserves, and the U.S. regulatory framework.

Open USD is precisely a concentrated embodiment of this trend. It uses blockchain as a new track for capital flows, but the unit of value remains the dollar; the underlying yields still come from reserve assets; and the governance structure is co-participated by enterprise alliances and financial institutions. It is not an anti-dollar financial revolution; it is more like a blockchain upgrade package for dollar hegemony.

This also explains why Hu Yilin believes stablecoins are becoming long-term enemies of most native cryptocurrencies. The issue is not only that stablecoins take away the function of a medium of exchange; it may also reshape the “base layer” structure of the on-chain world.

If the unit of account in on-chain finance is dollar stablecoins, the collateral assets are U.S. Treasuries and RWAs, the sources of yield are traditional financial assets, and users’ value anchors are also the dollar, then the more prosperous on-chain activity becomes, it does not necessarily translate into greater monetary premium for ETH, SOL, or other native base-layer coins. The on-chain world may flourish, but wealth accumulates in off-chain dollar assets, stablecoin issuers, and traditional financial yield structures. Using Hu Yilin’s earlier words, stablecoins break the logic of “the more prosperous the on-chain, the more the native coin appreciates,” turning it into “the more prosperous the on-chain, the richer the off-chain.”

“Sell Gasoline” Is Fine, But Don’t Downgrade a Civilization-Level Narrative to a Fee Narrative

The stablecoin issue also leads Hu Yilin to renew his criticism of Ethereum’s “oil” narrative. Many Ethereum supporters believe that even if the chain mainly uses USDT, USDC, or Open USD, transactions still require consuming ETH; DeFi activity still generates fees; and L2 still settles to the mainnet—so ETH will still benefit from on-chain prosperity.

Hu Yilin’s rebuttal is: fees certainly have value, but fees are not a monetary unit of account.

He continues the gas metaphor commonly used in the Ethereum community, but pushes the metaphor in the opposite direction. “The price of gasoline won’t be infinite, because once gasoline becomes expensive to a certain degree, people will have stronger incentives to look for alternative energy,” he said. Besides, replacing Ethereum is easier than replacing the gasoline infrastructure. Switching cars from gasoline to electric requires new industrial chains and product designs; but migrating a DeFi protocol from Ethereum to a compatible public chain involves much lower technical hurdles.

In his view, if Ethereum relies only on fee income, it will encounter an upper valuation limit for infrastructure service providers. Exchanges, clearinghouses, and payment networks can be important, but their revenue scale does not equate to a monetary premium for a standard asset. Hu Yilin counters with questions: How much does the Nasdaq exchange earn in fees in a year? When you add up the net income of global securities exchanges, is any one Apple company earning more?

However, he does not believe that all public chains must carry the same revolutionary mission. Public chains like Solana never had ambitions that large to begin with; their positioning is closer to “being a strong competitor at the company level,” such as becoming a high-performance alternative to Ethereum. Hu Yilin said that if a project’s “original positioning is to sell gasoline, then of course it can accept that positioning.” For such chains, fees, performance, ecosystem, developer experience, and the ability to migrate applications are the core metrics they can compete on.

The problem is that not all crypto assets can be satisfied with “selling gasoline.” Hu Yilin divides projects into three categories: the first is Bitcoin, which from its birth has been aimed at monetary revolution; the second is Ethereum, which wants to be a “world computer,” aiming to become a civilization-level innovation; and the third is many emerging small coins, which do not have traditional capital backing and must rely on grand narratives to attract attention and build trust.

Therefore, the real difference is not whether all coins should talk about revolution, but: any project that aims for a higher ceiling cannot avoid the revolutionary narrative. You can be only a block-space service provider, only a high-performance chain, or only a financial application platform. But if you claim you want to change the world, reorganize civilization’s foundational infrastructure, and become the next-generation currency or next-generation internet, then you cannot downgrade your native coin narrative into a fee-fuel narrative.

The Copernican Moment of the Crypto Revolution: The Earth Can Move

In the history of astronomy, the key to the Copernican revolution was not only that the computational model became simpler, but that people accepted a counterintuitive fact: the Earth can move, and people’s everyday lives do not collapse because of it.

Hu Yilin believes that the monetary revolution of blockchain and Bitcoin also has a similar threshold for thought. The true Copernican moment is not that stablecoins make cross-border transfers cheaper, nor that banks learn to use on-chain settlement; it is that market participants begin to realize: economic life does not necessarily require a fixed central bank as the center of monetary order.

“The key is that people liberate their thinking: the Earth can move, and my down-to-earth life does not depend on the Earth being still,” Hu Yilin said. When mapped to the monetary issue, the core idea is: “Our lives, normal market transactions, do not rely on a fixed central bank. We don’t need the central bank to step in at all times to maintain market stability. What money is and what value that money should have—those are determined spontaneously by the market, by each specific decentralized transaction, without needing any particular institution to decree it.”

This is also the fundamental reason he insists on the Bitcoin standard and criticizes the stablecoin standard. Stablecoins can improve efficiency, become transitional tools, and act as a bridge between the real world and the on-chain world. But if the on-chain world ultimately still uses dollars for pricing, uses U.S. Treasuries as underlying assets, and treats central-bank money as the final value measure, then the so-called “blockchain revolution” is only an add-on to the dollar system.

Open USD’s entry makes this debate clearer. It may be an important step in the commercialization, institutionalization, and scaling of stablecoins; but from the original ideals of crypto, it could also mark a successful co-optation of blockchain technology by the old system.

Hu Yilin does not deny the historical significance of stablecoins. But historical significance is not the same as revolution being completed. The Tychonic system once became popular precisely because it could accommodate both new technology and old authority; but what truly changed the picture of the world was a new paradigm that let the Earth move.

The crypto world faces the same question: if the dollar never moves and the Fed is always at the center, then no matter how open and efficient stablecoins become, they are only precise instruments of the old universe. True revolution has to wait until the market believes that the monetary order can rotate without that center.