Open USD lets the old currency system step in personally.

Author: "Hua" "Hu Yilin" Source: X, @epr510

Introduction

The debut of Open USD shifts the stablecoin competition from a market battle among crypto startups to an infrastructure clash involving traditional finance, payment networks, tech platforms, and public blockchain ecosystems. Regarding this new alliance involving over 140 institutions, scholar Hu Yilin believes stablecoins are not the moderate wing of the crypto revolution, but rather a "royalist reform" within the old monetary system: they inherit blockchain's efficiency while preserving the centrality of the US dollar and the Federal Reserve. The true crypto revolution must ultimately return to a more fundamental question: Must market life rely on a central bank as the center of monetary order?

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

On June 30, Open Standard announced the launch of Open USD, a US dollar stablecoin designed for global capital flows. According to official descriptions, Open USD features three key designs: enterprises can mint and redeem at zero cost; reserve yields, after deducting minimal management fees, are distributed to partners; it is operated by Open Standard, an independent company, with a board of directors composed of partners overseeing governance. The list of participants spans payments, banking, technology, and crypto industries, 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 launch on networks such as Base and Solana later this year, with approximately 140 companies already signed up. The report also noted that USDT and USDC remain the two largest stablecoins, with a combined market cap of about $260 billion. Barron's observed that after the announcement of Open USD, stocks of related companies like Circle and Coinbase came under pressure, as the new alliance directly threatens the stablecoin business model of USDC.

On the surface, this marks an escalation of competition in the stablecoin industry: more enterprises joining, more channels connected, and a redesigned mechanism for distributing reserve yields. However, in Hu Yilin's view, the greater significance of Open USD lies not in how much market share it takes from USDC or USDT, but in what it reveals about stablecoins' historical position: Stablecoins have not truly challenged the dollar standard; they merely enable the dollar standard to operate more efficiently.

Stablecoins Are Not "Moderates" but "Royalists"

Hu Yilin supports the development of stablecoins because they directly impact fiat currency and the banking system, forcing real-world political and economic structures to change. However, he emphasizes that supporting stablecoins as tools does not mean recognizing them as the completed form of the crypto revolution.

He previously compared stablecoins to the Tychonic system in the Copernican revolution: The Tychonic system absorbed many technological advantages of the new astronomy and could explain more phenomena, making it more acceptable to traditional authorities during the revolution. But it rejected the core idea—it did not allow the Earth to move. Stablecoins are similar. They inherit blockchain's settlement efficiency, programmability, global liquidity, and cross-border payment advantages, yet they refuse to remove the US dollar from the central position.

Discussing Open USD, Hu Yilin further distinguishes between "moderates" and "royalists." He says, "I think someone like Michael Saylor counts as a 'moderate.' He also seeks compatibility with the old system, but he holds onto the core revolutionary point of the 'Bitcoin standard.'" That is, the Saylor-style approach can accommodate listed companies, accounting standards, debt financing, capital markets, and regulatory frameworks, but it still treats Bitcoin as the new reserve asset. It compromises with the old system but does not abandon the revolutionary core that "the emperor can be replaced."

Stablecoins are different. Hu Yilin says, "Stablecoins have historical significance, but they are not true revolutionaries." In his view, stablecoins are more like reformers within the old system, believing that "the emperor (the dollar, the Fed) is fine; it's just that the execution system below is bloated and inefficient. The previous 'Eastern Depot' didn't perform well, so now it's up to the 'Western Depot' to improve things."

This metaphor sharply points out the inherent limitation of stablecoins: They oppose not the centrality of the dollar, but the inefficiency of old payment systems, bank settlement networks, cross-border transfer systems, and financial intermediaries. They aim to replace grassroots bureaucracy, not the supreme authority.

Therefore, when the crypto revolution can only touch "execution systems" like banks, payment companies, SWIFT, Visa, and Alipay, stablecoins and more radical cryptocurrency routes appear aligned: both oppose the expensive, slow, and opaque old financial system. But once the issue touches the dollar, US Treasuries, the Federal Reserve, and the fiat standard, their divergence becomes apparent. Hu Yilin says stablecoins "from the start prevent the revolution from deepening." This is not to deny stablecoins' progressive significance, but to say that their progressive significance is, from the outset, confined within the old monetary order.

When the Old System Steps In, What's Left for Stablecoin Entrepreneurs?

The uniqueness of Open USD lies in the fact that it is not a new coin launched by a single crypto startup team, but an alliance project involving payment companies, banks, tech platforms, asset managers, and public blockchain ecosystems. Open Standard officially emphasizes that it aims to give enterprises higher participation in stablecoin reserve yields, governance, and large-scale usage.

This is precisely where Hu Yilin finds Open USD symbolic. In the past, a core narrative of USD stablecoins was that traditional finance was too slow, expensive, and closed, so crypto companies had to use blockchain to improve its efficiency. But now, traditional finance and payment giants are starting to organize their own stablecoin networks. The old system is no longer just the object of reform; it has become the initiator and manager 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, integrate with the banking system, and improve payment efficiency, then when institutions like Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Google, and Coinbase jointly launch their own stablecoin network, original stablecoin entrepreneurs can hardly claim they hold irreplaceable revolutionary legitimacy.

He frames this issue as a series of questions: What exactly are stablecoins supposed to revolutionize? SWIFT? What if interbank settlements also start using stablecoins? Visa or Alipay payment networks? What if they themselves accept, issue, or participate in stablecoin networks?

In his view, if the goal of stablecoins is merely to get the old system to adopt blockchain payment technology, then when the old system adopts stablecoins, the stablecoin movement can declare success and even "retire with honor." But if native stablecoin companies still are not willing to be co-opted, they must redefine their fundamental difference from the old system.

"If you still feel unwilling, then you must return to the path of decentralization, abandon compromise, and continue the revolution," Hu Yilin says.

Here, "drawing a clear line" does not have to take only one form. Hu Yilin does not require all projects to follow Bitcoin's route. They can insist on a coin standard, decentralized governance, censorship resistance, self-custody, non-freezability, open protocols, and exit rights. But the key is that native crypto innovators must retain something truly "disobedient."

"A coin standard is certainly the hardest core; emphasizing governance structure is okay, emphasizing censorship resistance is okay, but you must emphasize something rebellious," he says.

This phrase highlights the awkwardness of the stablecoin narrative: When a project's entire selling points are built on compliance, efficiency, low cost, institutional friendliness, and compatibility with old finance, it may ultimately not overthrow the old system but be absorbed by it as a new department.

The Blockchain Upgrade Package for Dollar Hegemony

Hu Yilin agrees with a more macro judgment: The more successful USD stablecoins become, the more it may signify the success of the dollar system, not necessarily the success of cryptocurrencies.

If global cross-border e-commerce, migrant remittances, on-chain transactions, RWA, DeFi, and corporate settlements increasingly use USD stablecoins, what might be weakened are local banking systems, traditional cross-border payment networks, and some capital controls. But what is strengthened is dollar pricing, US Treasury reserve assets, and the US regulatory framework.

Open USD is a concentrated manifestation of this trend. It uses blockchain as a new track for capital flows, but the unit of account remains the dollar, the underlying returns still come from reserve assets, and governance is shared by a corporate alliance and financial institutions. It is not a financial revolution against the dollar; it is more like a blockchain upgrade package for dollar hegemony.

This also explains why Hu Yilin believes stablecoins are becoming the long-term enemy of most native cryptocurrencies. The issue is not just stablecoins taking over the medium of exchange function, but possibly reshaping the reserve structure of the on-chain world.

If the pricing unit of on-chain finance is USD stablecoins, collateral assets are US Treasuries and RWAs, returns come from traditional financial assets, and users' value anchor is also the dollar, then the more prosperous on-chain activity becomes, the less it necessarily implies monetary premium for ETH, SOL, or other underlying chain-native tokens. The on-chain world can thrive, but wealth accumulates in off-chain dollar assets, stablecoin issuers, and traditional financial yield structures. As Hu Yilin previously put it, stablecoins break the logic that "the more prosperous the on-chain world, the more the native token appreciates," turning it into "the more prosperous the on-chain world, the richer the off-chain world."

"Selling Fuel" Is Fine, But Don't Downgrade Civilization-Level Narratives to Fee Narratives

The stablecoin issue also leads Hu Yilin to re-criticize Ethereum's "oil" narrative. Many Ethereum supporters argue that even if the chain mainly uses USDT, USDC, or Open USD, transactions still require ETH, DeFi activity still generates fees, and L2s still settle to the mainnet, so ETH still benefits from on-chain prosperity.

Hu Yilin's rebuttal is that fees certainly have value, but fees are not a monetary standard.

He continues the gas metaphor commonly used by the Ethereum community, but turns it in the opposite direction. "The price of gasoline cannot be infinite, because when gasoline becomes expensive enough, people have a stronger incentive to find alternative energy sources," he says. Moreover, replacing Ethereum is far easier than replacing gasoline infrastructure. For a car to switch from fuel to electric, a new industrial chain and product design are needed. But for a DeFi protocol to migrate from Ethereum to a compatible public chain, the technical barrier is much lower.

In his view, if Ethereum relies solely on fee income, it will hit the valuation ceiling of infrastructure service providers. Exchanges, clearinghouses, and payment networks can be important, but their revenue scale does not equal the monetary premium of a reserve asset. Hu Yilin asks: How much does the Nasdaq exchange earn in fees per year? Do the total net revenues of global stock exchanges surpass the revenue of a single Apple company?

However, he does not believe all public chains must bear the same revolutionary mission. Chains like Solana never had such grand ambitions; their positioning is closer to being a "strong competitor at the corporate level," such as becoming a high-performance alternative to Ethereum. Hu Yilin says that if a project's "original positioning is to sell fuel, then it can certainly accept that role." For such chains, fees, performance, ecosystem, developer experience, and application migration capability are the core metrics they can compete on.

The problem is that not all crypto assets can be satisfied with "selling fuel." Hu Yilin distinguishes three categories: First is Bitcoin, which from inception aimed at monetary revolution. Second is Ethereum, which wants to be a "world computer" and a civilization-level innovation. Third are many emerging tokens that lack traditional capital backing and must rely on grand narratives to attract attention and trust.

Thus, the real divide is not whether all coins need a revolutionary narrative, but: Those wishing to pursue a higher ceiling cannot avoid a revolutionary narrative. You can just be a block space provider, a high-performance chain, or a financial application platform. But if you claim to change the world, restructure civilization's infrastructure, or become the next-generation currency or internet, then you cannot downgrade your native token narrative to merely fee-based fuel.

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

In the history of astronomy, the key to the Copernican revolution was not just a simpler calculation model, but people accepting a counterintuitive fact: the Earth can move, yet daily life does not collapse.

Hu Yilin believes that blockchain and Bitcoin's monetary revolution has a similar threshold of thought. The true Copernican moment is not when stablecoins make cross-border transfers cheaper, nor when banks learn on-chain settlement. It is when market participants begin to realize: economic life need not rely on 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 stationary," Hu Yilin says. Corresponding to monetary issues, the core idea is: "Our lives, normal market transactions, do not depend on a fixed central bank. We don't need the central bank to intervene constantly to maintain market stability. What money is and how much it is worth are determined spontaneously by the market, by every specific transaction. It does not require a specific 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, serve as transitional tools, and bridge the real world and the on-chain world. But if the on-chain world ultimately prices in dollars, uses US Treasuries as underlying assets, and treats central bank money as the ultimate measure of value, then the so-called "blockchain revolution" is merely an appendage of the dollar system.

The debut of Open USD precisely clarifies this debate. It may be a significant step for stablecoin commercialization, institutionalization, and scaling. But from the original ideals of cryptocurrency, it may 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 does not equal the completion of revolution. The Tychonic system was once popular precisely because it could accommodate new technology and old authority. But what truly changed the world's picture was the new paradigm that allowed the Earth to move.

For the crypto world, the question is the same: If the dollar never moves and the Fed always remains at the center, then no matter how open and efficient stablecoins become, they are just precision instruments in the old universe. The true revolution awaits when the market believes that monetary order can revolve without that center.