Stablecoin Alliance Launches Open USD, Circle Expresses Welcome for Industry Competition

On June 30, 2026, an interesting piece of news emerged in the U.S. stablecoin market.

Open Standard announced the launch of a new dollar stablecoin called Open USD, abbreviated as OUSD. The list of participants in the announcement was impressive, including over 140 companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, Google, Shopify, Coinbase, Solana, Ripple, and others.

If it were just "another dollar stablecoin being launched," this wouldn't be worth getting excited about. The stablecoin market never lacks new names—what it truly lacks is liquidity, use cases, regulatory trust, and sustained operational capability.

But OUSD is different. What makes it truly interesting isn't that it's another coin, but that it brings a question to the table that the stablecoin industry hasn't openly discussed much:

Who should get a share of the money earned from stablecoin reserve assets?

That's also why I think OUSD is worth writing about.

In the past few years, stablecoin issuers have used the dollars or equivalent assets deposited by users as reserves, and those reserves generate interest. The bulk of the revenue goes to the issuer and a few core distribution partners. Payment companies, exchanges, wallets, merchant platforms, and developers help bring stablecoins into real-world use, but they don't necessarily get enough economic return.

OUSD aims to change this distribution logic.

To put it in plain terms, it's like a "cooperative" in the stablecoin world: instead of a single issuer keeping most of the revenue, it brings in payment networks, financial institutions, tech platforms, and crypto on-ramps to promote, govern, and share the revenue together.

Open USD doesn't change the technology—it changes the revenue-sharing model

According to Open Standard's official announcement, OUSD's design has three main features.

First, enterprises can mint and redeem OUSD at no cost, with no artificially set upper limit. For large, high-frequency institutional users, this directly reduces the cost of use.

Second, the returns generated by OUSD's reserve assets, after deducting a small management fee, will be distributed to partners. Note that this doesn't mean ordinary token holders get interest directly—rather, it returns the economic benefits of the stablecoin network back to ecosystem participants.

Third, OUSD will be operated by Open Standard, an independent company, with a board of directors composed of partners participating in governance. In other words, it tries to avoid having a single issuer fully control the stablecoin's roadmap, revenue model, and governance arrangements.

Taken together, these three points are what truly make OUSD a disruptor to the current market.

Stablecoins appear to be payment tools, but they are essentially a financial infrastructure business. Users hold 1 stablecoin, and behind the issuance system is $1 in reserves. If those reserve assets are invested in cash, short-term Treasuries, or money market instruments, they generate interest. In a high-interest rate environment, this is a significant income stream.

In the past, this income mainly went to the issuer. OUSD's logic is that since stablecoins rely on payment companies, merchant platforms, banks, exchanges, wallets, and developers to be adopted, these channel partners shouldn't just be working for free.

This is not a small adjustment. It directly targets the core profit of the stablecoin industry.

Why is Circle being repriced by the market?

After the OUSD announcement, Circle's stock price came under pressure. The market reaction was straightforward: if payment giants, banks, tech platforms, and crypto infrastructure companies start jointly promoting a new dollar stablecoin, the growth story of USDC becomes less smooth.

But Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire's response was measured. He welcomed competition, while emphasizing that USDC's network effects, regulatory access, liquidity, and years of ecosystem accumulation cannot be replicated by a fancy list of names.

I don't think this response is just lip service.

What Circle really means is: stablecoins are not a business built on press releases—they are network businesses.

USDC wasn't built overnight. It has exchange depth, on-chain integrations, institutional clients, compliance disclosures, redemption capabilities, and developer ecosystem. The more people use a stablecoin, the deeper the liquidity; the deeper the liquidity, the more people use it. This network effect cannot be replaced overnight by 140 logos.

But the threat from Open USD is real.

Because it's not a small company launching a coin—it's organizing the downstream gateways of stablecoins. Behind names like Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase, BlackRock, and BNY are payment clearing, merchant acquiring, consumer scenarios, crypto trading, asset management, and custody capabilities.

In the past, issuers looked for channels to distribute stablecoins. What Open USD wants to do is have the channels define the stablecoin together.

That's why Circle is being repriced by the market.

Circle says it welcomes competition, but the pressure won't go away

Circle's rebuttal probably has two layers.

The first is network effects. USDC has built years of market trust and real usage scenarios. What OUSD really needs to prove is not whether big companies are backing it, but whether these companies will actually channel real capital flows, merchant traffic, and transaction scenarios into it.

The second is the revenue-sharing logic. Allaire's point is that Circle already distributes a large share of income to distribution partners while retaining enough revenue to continue investing in infrastructure. In other words, "sharing revenue" is not unique to OUSD—what matters is how to share, with whom, and whether this model can support long-term development.

This assessment is reasonable.

But what the market fears is not that OUSD will replace USDC tomorrow—it's that the trend is changing. In the future, banks, payment companies, fintech platforms, and merchant networks may all enter the stablecoin issuance or distribution ecosystem. As long as people start asking, "Why should I bring you users and transactions but can't get a bigger share of the revenue?" Circle's business model will face ongoing scrutiny.

That's the core of the second half of the stablecoin competition.

In the first half, the question was: Who is more transparent? Who is more compliant? Whose reserves are more credible?

In the second half, the question will be: Who controls the channels? Who controls the use cases? Who shares the revenue?

The "cooperative model" sounds good, but history doesn't always favor it

Alliance-based stablecoins are not a first-time occurrence.

The most typical example is Libra, later renamed Diem. In 2019, Facebook led a consortium of big names to launch a global stablecoin. Its participant lineup back then was also impressive, and it similarly tried to bring payment, tech, financial, and internet platforms into one system.

We all know how that ended. The project faced global regulatory pushback, partners gradually withdrew, governance and compliance pressures mounted, and eventually the assets were sold off—never truly launched to the public.

Of course, OUSD is not Diem. Today's regulatory environment and market maturity are different. The U.S. GENIUS Act was signed into law on July 18, 2025, establishing a federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins for the first time. While the main obligations still need to be implemented through subsequent rulemaking, compared to the Libra/Diem era, the regulatory boundaries for issuer access, reserve arrangements, anti-money laundering, and sanctions compliance are much clearer now.

But the old problems of alliance projects won't disappear automatically.

How do you cold-start liquidity? How do you make decisions among partners? Who is the reserve custodian? Is the redemption arrangement stable enough? Who is responsible for KYC, AML, sanctions screening, and freezing mechanisms? If interest rates fall in the future and reserve returns thin out, can free minting/redemption and partner revenue sharing be sustained?

These are the real tests for OUSD.

So my attitude toward OUSD is: recognize its model disruption, but don't pre-assume its success.

It has raised a good question, but a good question is not necessarily a good answer.

For Asian industry practitioners, what really matters is not the hype

This event has three practical implications for crypto payments, cross-border settlements, cross-border e-commerce, and Web3 businesses with Asian backgrounds.

First, the multi-stablecoin era is coming—choosing a coin will become a compliance issue.

In the past, when enterprises used stablecoins for payments and settlements, they mainly chose between USDT and USDC. In the future, if OUSD, bank-issued stablecoins, and payment-institution stablecoins keep emerging, companies may face the need to integrate more coins.

But integrating a new stablecoin is not just adding a payment option. Companies need to evaluate the issuer, reserve assets, redemption arrangements, freezing mechanisms, on-chain deployment, custody structure, sanctions compliance, and user terms. Choosing a coin is no longer just a business decision—it involves legal, financial, compliance, and risk control teams.

Second, compliance is shifting from a moat to a ticket to entry.

In the past, USDC's key selling point over USDT was its transparency, compliance, and institutional acceptance. But as the U.S. stablecoin regulatory framework becomes clearer, more banks, payment companies, and fintech firms will enter the market within the rules. In the future, all top players will talk about compliance, so compliance is no longer a competitive advantage for a few—it's just the price of admission.

Third, the Asian market won't be rewritten in the short term, but enterprise settlement scenarios are worth watching.

USDT's liquidity dominance in Asian OTC markets and high-frequency trading scenarios won't be shaken just because OUSD hasn't launched yet. OUSD is also not targeting retail users—it's targeting enterprise capital flows, merchant payments, cross-border payments, and platform settlements.

If platforms like Stripe, Shopify, Western Union, and Coinbase eventually add OUSD as a default settlement route, the first to feel the impact might not be crypto retail investors, but companies dealing with cross-border payments, overseas SaaS, cross-border trade, and crypto payments.

Conclusion

Open USD may not become the USDC killer, nor shake USDT's global liquidity.

But it has already raised a pointed enough question: Who should share the economic benefits generated by stablecoins?

If stablecoins are just products of an issuer, and the reserve income mainly goes to the issuer, that logic makes sense.

But if stablecoins are becoming the underlying infrastructure of payment networks, then payment companies, merchant platforms, banks, exchanges, wallets, and developers will all demand a seat at the table.

Circle welcomes competition because it believes in USDC's network effects and compliance accumulation. Open USD emphasizes open governance and shared revenue because it sees the imbalance of benefits among channel partners in the existing stablecoin model.

This competition will ultimately not be decided by press releases, nor by 140 logos. It will be decided by real capital flows, real transaction volumes, real redemption pressure, and real regulatory scrutiny.

But regardless of whether Open USD ultimately succeeds, it has already changed the way questions are asked in the stablecoin industry.

From now on, any issuer that wants to keep all the reserve income for itself must first answer one question from its channel partners:

Why should we?