Open USD officially launched, Circle welcomes competition among stablecoin market peers.

On June 30, 2026, a very interesting news broke in the U.S. stablecoin market.

Open Standard announced the launch of a new U.S. dollar stablecoin, Open USD (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, and Ripple.

If it were just "another U.S. dollar stablecoin," this would not 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 is not that it's another coin, but that it brings to the table a problem that the stablecoin industry has rarely addressed openly:

Who should get the profits earned from stablecoin reserve assets?

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

Over the past few years, stablecoin issuers have used the U.S. dollars or equivalent assets deposited by users as reserves, earning interest on those reserves, with the main profits going to the issuers and a few core distribution partners. Payment companies, exchanges, wallets, merchant platforms, and developers help bring stablecoins into real-world use cases but don't necessarily share enough economic returns.

What OUSD wants to change is this distribution logic.

Put simply, it's like a "cooperative" in the stablecoin world: instead of one issuer gobbling up most of the profits, it brings in payment networks, financial institutions, tech platforms, and crypto gateways to promote, govern, and share the profits together.

Open USD doesn't change the technology, but the revenue-sharing model

According to Open Standard's official announcement, OUSD's design has three main points:

First, enterprises can mint and redeem OUSD for free, with no artificial upper limit on size. This directly reduces the cost of use for large, high-frequency institutional users.

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 can directly earn interest; rather, the economic benefits of the stablecoin network are returned to the ecosystem participants.

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

These three points together are what truly impact the current market.

Stablecoins look like payment tools, but essentially they are a financial infrastructure business. When users hold one stablecoin, the issuing system gets one U.S. dollar in reserves. If those reserves are invested in cash, short-term U.S. Treasuries, or money market instruments, they generate interest. In a high-interest-rate environment, this is a substantial stream of income.

In the past, this income mainly belonged to the issuer. OUSD's logic is that since stablecoins depend on payment companies, merchant platforms, banks, exchanges, wallets, and developers to promote them, these channel partners should not work for free.

This is no small adjustment. It directly touches the core of the stablecoin industry's most lucrative pie.

Why is Circle being repriced by the market?

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

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 just a list of big names.

I think this response is not just lip service.

What Circle really means is that stablecoins are not a press-release business, but a network business.

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

But Open USD's threat is also real.

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

In the past, issuers found channels to distribute stablecoins. What Open USD wants to do is let channel partners collectively define the stablecoin.

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

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

Circle's counterargument likely has two layers.

First is network effects. USDC has accumulated years of market trust and real-world usage. What OUSD truly needs to prove is not that it has big-name endorsements, but whether these companies will actually bring in real capital flows, merchant traffic, and trading scenarios.

Second is the profit-sharing logic. Allaire's point is that Circle already distributes a significant portion of its revenue to distribution partners while retaining enough income to continue investing in infrastructure. In other words, "sharing revenue" is not unique to OUSD; the key is how it's shared, with whom, and whether the model can sustain long-term development.

This judgment makes sense.

But the market's concern is not that OUSD will replace USDC tomorrow, but that the trend is shifting. In the future, banks, payment companies, fintech platforms, and merchant networks may all enter the stablecoin issuance or distribution system. As long as people start asking, "Why do I bring you users and transactions but can't share more of the revenue?" Circle's business model will face continuous scrutiny.

That's the core of the next phase of stablecoin competition.

In the first phase, people asked: Who is more transparent? Who is more compliant? Whose reserves are more trustworthy?

In the next phase, they'll ask: Who controls the channels? Who controls the use cases? Who shares the revenue?

The "cooperative model" sounds good, but history is not always on its side

Alliance-based stablecoins are not new.

The most typical example is Libra, later renamed Diem. In 2019, Facebook led a high-profile alliance to launch a global stablecoin. Its participant lineup was equally impressive, and it also tried to bring payment, tech, finance, and internet platforms into one system.

Everyone knows what happened. The project faced global regulatory resistance, partners gradually withdrew, governance and compliance pressures mounted, and finally the assets were sold off without ever being publicly launched.

OUSD is not Diem, of course. 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-level regulatory framework for payment stablecoins for the first time. Although the main obligations still need to be implemented through subsequent rulemaking, the regulatory boundaries—such as issuer access, reserve arrangements, anti-money laundering, and sanctions compliance—are much clearer than in the Libra/Diem era.

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

How to bootstrap liquidity? How to make decisions among partners? Who is the reserve custodian? Are the redemption arrangements stable enough? Who is responsible for KYC, AML, sanctions screening, and freeze mechanisms? If interest rates drop in the future and reserve returns thin out, can free minting/redemption and partner profit-sharing be sustained?

These are the real tests for OUSD.

So my attitude toward OUSD is: take its model impact seriously, but don't pre-empt its success.

It has raised a good question, but a good question is not the same as a good answer.

For Asia-based professionals, the real takeaway is not just the spectacle

For crypto payments, cross-border settlements, cross-border e-commerce, and Web3 companies with an Asian background, there are three practical implications:

First, the era of multi-stablecoins is coming, and choosing a coin will become a compliance issue.

Previously, when companies used stablecoins for payments, they mainly chose between USDT and USDC. In the future, as OUSD, bank-issued stablecoins, and payment-institution stablecoins emerge, 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, freeze mechanisms, on-chain deployment, custody structures, sanctions compliance, and user terms. Choosing a coin is not just a business decision; it involves legal, financial, compliance, and risk management.

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

In the past, a key selling point of USDC over USDT was greater transparency, compliance, and institutional acceptance. But as the U.S. stablecoin regulatory framework becomes clearer, more banks, payment companies, and fintechs will enter the market within the rules. In the future, all major players will talk about compliance, so compliance will no longer be a differentiating advantage for a few, but a ticket to entry.

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

USDT's liquidity position in Asian OTC and high-frequency trading won't be shaken just because OUSD hasn't launched yet. OUSD targets not retail users but enterprise-level capital flows, merchant payments, cross-border payments, and platform settlements.

If in the future platforms like Stripe, Shopify, Western Union, and Coinbase include OUSD as a default settlement path, the first to feel the change may not be crypto retail investors, but companies involved in cross-border payments, overseas SaaS, cross-border trade, and crypto payments.

Conclusion

Open USD may not become a USDC killer, nor can it necessarily shake USDT's global liquidity.

But it has already posed a sharp enough question: who should share the economic benefits generated by stablecoins?

If stablecoins are just products of an issuer, with reserve returns mainly going to the issuer, it makes logical 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 interests among channel partners in the current stablecoin model.

This competition will ultimately be decided not by press releases or 140 logos, but by real capital flows, real transaction volumes, real redemption pressure, and real regulatory scrutiny.

But whether or not Open USD succeeds, it has already rewritten the way questions are asked in the stablecoin industry.

From now on, any issuer that wants to monopolize reserve returns will first have to answer one question from channel partners:

Why?