From USDGO to OUSD: Corporate stablecoins “crossed 1 billion”—what’s left before reaching 10 billion?

Regarding corporate stablecoins, over the past few years the market has been discussing a story of something “that’s about to happen.”

There are many versions of this story, but the core thread is broadly the same: traditional financial institutions are entering the scene, compliant stablecoins will become the underlying infrastructure for cross-border payments, and corporate treasury management will shift to a new paradigm as a result. And bearing all of this will be a new batch of stablecoins co-participated in by banks, payment institutions, and technology platforms.

Very few people question this narrative.

In fact, precisely because it is so reasonable, the market has given it such high attention and expectations—after all, institutions and enterprises really do need a digital dollar that can enjoy blockchain efficiency while also being acceptable to finance, compliance, and risk teams. It’s just that in the past, most of the discussion stayed in the future tense: which institutions are preparing to enter, what products are about to be launched, and which payment and settlement scenarios are likely to migrate on-chain.

Until recently, two leads worth watching together emerged in the market at the same time:

• On June 30, Open Standard officially released Open USD (OUSD), gathering more than 140 financial, payments, technology, and crypto companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Google, and Coinbase, and plans to go live in late 2026;
• On July 20, according to DefiLlama’s statistics methodology, the circulating supply of another enterprise stablecoin, USDGO, exceeded $1 billion, placing it among the top six global regulated stablecoin by circulation, and becoming the largest dollar regulated stablecoin operated by an Asia-based stablecoin operator;

In a sense, OUSD aims to elevate the demand for enterprise stablecoins into a global industry consensus, while USDGO’s $1 billion also provides a real-world sample with significant forward-looking value for that consensus.

Enterprise stablecoins seem to be entering a new stage where “distribution is king.”

1. With USDT and USDC already available, why do we still need “OUSD types”?

With USDT and USDC already having built a massive liquidity network, why does the market need another dollar stablecoin?

This is an old topic, and also the first threshold that every enterprise stablecoin has to face—yet in the past, many discussions boiled the opportunity for enterprise stablecoins down to two structural pain points in the traditional payments system:

• First are compliance costs. Compliance review for cross-border fund flows is not a one-time thing; it is embedded into every transaction—anti-money-laundering checks, sanctions-list screening, cross-border reporting, and rule alignment across different jurisdictions. Every additional step means more uncertainty;
• Second is settlement efficiency. A cross-border B2B payment of tens of thousands of dollars often needs to go through multiple stages such as message passing, intermediary banks, foreign exchange conversion, and final crediting. This leads to fees, FX spread, and capital-occupancy costs stacking up layer by layer, and settlement cycles typically require several business days;

But in reality, the opportunity for enterprise stablecoins never comes solely from the fact that existing stablecoins are “not compliant enough,” or from traditional payment systems being “not fast enough.” The deeper reason is that the way enterprises use money—and the standards they require—are fundamentally different from how crypto users use stablecoins.

You see, in the crypto market, stablecoins are first and foremost a liquidity asset.

Exchanges provide the trading entry, wallets and blockchains handle transfers, and DeFi protocols provide lending, market-making, and yield scenarios. This also means that as long as a stablecoin has sufficiently deep trading pairs and on-chain liquidity, users naturally choose it.

But a multinational enterprise will not migrate supplier payments, merchant settlement, and treasury management on-chain just because a stablecoin transfer is faster. It also has to deal with issuer risk, subscription and redemption, fiat conversion, technical integration, accounting treatment, liquidity management, and regulatory requirements across different markets.

To put it simply, enterprises care about a whole set of issues—for example, who is the legal issuer? Who manages the reserve assets? Can large subscriptions and redemptions be completed smoothly? How do you convert between fiat and stablecoin? Can finance costs be optimized? How do you integrate with existing financial systems? How do you perform customer identification, anti-money-laundering, sanctions screening, and accounting treatment?

Besides that, from the perspective of economic incentives, traditional stablecoin models designed for crypto trading markets may not be replicable verbatim in the enterprise payments space.

In the old model, issuers like Tether/Circle only need to handle stablecoin issuance and reserve management, and capture most of the收益 generated by the reserve assets. Exchanges, wallets, and various on-chain protocols handle the “dirty work” such as trading entry, product integration, liquidity building, and user acquisition.

This model can work well in the crypto market because stablecoins themselves are indispensable liquidity tools for exchanges and on-chain protocols. Even if channels cannot directly share reserve-asset收益, they can still earn returns through trading, custody, lending, and other services.

But in the enterprise market, the cost of distributing a stablecoin is clearly much higher. Payment companies, banks, and fintech platforms not only have to complete technical integration and compliance review, but also have to persuade enterprises to change settlement tools, adjust fund flows, and continuously provide fiat in/out, liquidity management, accounting reconciliation, and customer service.

So if the economic benefits created by stablecoin growth are still mainly monopolized by the issuer, then the institutions that truly bear the responsibility of finding customers, building payment rails, and driving enterprise adoption may not have enough incentive to keep investing long-term.

OUSD and USDGO are trying to change this relationship:

• According to the design published by Open Standard, aside from small management fees needed for day-to-day operations,收益 from the reserve assets will be distributed to partners such as banks, payment platforms, e-commerce enterprises, and technology service providers—in other words, OUSD is a stablecoin network jointly built, jointly governed, and with shared economic收益 by adopters;
• USDGO’s chosen path is more oriented toward real-world execution. Starting from regulated issuance, regional distribution, and specific enterprise scenarios, it uses Anchorage Digital Bank as the issuer and reserve backbone, while OSL handles brand operations, market distribution, and enterprise onboarding, and gradually connects payments, custody, fiat in/out, and liquidity service providers. By relying on professional division of labor among the issuer, regional operators, and service partners, the goal is to lower the entry barriers for enterprise adoption and use, and USDGO’s ecosystem customers can also receive ecosystem participation rewards;

The two paths differ slightly, but they point to the same industry judgment: what enterprises need is never just a token that can transfer on-chain. It is a funds network that can connect different markets, accounts, fiat systems, and commercial platforms.

For banks, it might be used for digital asset settlement and enterprise fund management; for payment companies, it might be used for merchant clearing and cross-border payments; for internet platforms, it might become the underlying tool for merchants, creators, and gig worker payouts; for crypto enterprises, it can continue to take on on-chain transaction and liquidity functions.

From this perspective, enterprise stablecoins are indeed entering a “distribution is king” stage, and OUSD’s launch also shows that traditional large payment institutions are trying to prove that global financial, payments, technology, and crypto enterprises are willing to sit at the same table around a new way of organizing a stablecoin.

The question is whether it can truly be transformed into a highly efficient and continuously operating payments-and-distribution network—because the scale of a distribution network and the actual business scale it creates are still two different things.

2. USDGO’s early validation: what signals are worth watching?

If you want to judge how far OUSD can go, USDGO—already running for nearly half a year—provides a sample worth observing.

It went live on February 10, 2026. The initial issuance on Solana was $50 million. After that, circulation exceeded $68 million within a month; it surpassed $100 million in April; exceeded $500 million in June; and in July it further reached $1 billion.

In less than half a year, growing from $50 million to $1 billion at least suggests that even though USDT and USDC already occupy the majority share of the stablecoin market, there is still a huge untapped blue ocean in enterprise demand for compliant digital dollars—and it can be converted into a non-trivial real-world funding scale that also makes people willing to hold and use.

And what’s truly worth focusing on about this $1 billion is, of course, not just the growth rate.

For enterprises, USDGO’s appeal depends not only on which blockchain it runs on, and not only on faster on-chain transfer speed. As mentioned above, the prerequisite for enterprises to use stablecoins is that issuance, reserves, subscriptions and redemptions, regional distribution, fiat rails, and compliance services can be stitched into a complete chain.

For example, Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., the issuer of USDGO, is the first crypto bank in the United States to obtain federal regulatory oversight. The key star names that co-issue the stablecoin with Anchorage include, most notably, the global cross-border payments giant Western Union, and also the global stablecoin leader Tether (yes—within the U.S. compliant dollar stablecoin category, Tether issues with Anchorage).

In other words, USDGO’s issuer is not some typical offshore foundation, nor a Web3 project in the network world, nor a crypto-community organization. It is a licensed institution regulated by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and holding a federal banking license.

As for the OSL Group, which serves as the operator and distributor of USDGO, it is also familiar to users who have long followed the Hong Kong crypto market. As Hong Kong’s first licensed listed virtual asset platform, it has long been one of the representative banners for the development of Hong Kong’s virtual asset market. In recent years it has also begun aggressively laying out payment and trading tracks centered on stablecoins, and has obtained dozens of compliant licenses and registrations worldwide.

This means that at least in the publicly visible compliance chain, USDGO offers a “double insurance” architecture that is closer to how traditional finance understands things— the compliance attributes of dollar assets are backed by a federal-level bank, while deployment and distribution in the Asian market are handled by a licensed listed institution.

Of course, compliance alone is not enough to make enterprises actually use stablecoins. Traditional enterprises use bank accounts and don’t need to separately search for a custodian, an FX exchange platform, a clearing network, and transaction verification tools. So if stablecoins require enterprises to assemble the entire on-chain infrastructure themselves, it would be difficult for them to truly become a large-scale commercial tool.

Therefore, USDGO is not merely built around token issuance from the start. It attempts to combine payments, trading, custody, fiat in/out, and liquidity management. While providing robust infrastructure, it also offers ecosystem support that helps enterprise customers in the ecosystem reduce costs and improve efficiency. Based on information disclosed by OSL, USDGO has collaborated with payment and trading service providers including Banxa, Yellow Card, GoldStack, PolyFlow, Geoswift, Vantage, etc., covering scenarios such as cross-border e-commerce, international trade, on-chain fund transfers, enterprise fund management, and digital asset trading. In terms of on-chain infrastructure and institutional custody, it has also integrated Solana, Fireblocks, Cactus Custody, and Amber Group.

The key to this approach is not to make every enterprise learn how to manage wallets and operate blockchains. Instead, hide stablecoins behind the payments and fund-management workflows. What enterprises see can be a set of APIs, a settlement account, or an enterprise payment interface—while the underlying funds complete cross-border transfer, conversion, and clearing via the stablecoin.

This aligns with the direction repeatedly emphasized by the OUSD participating institutions as well: stablecoins ultimately should not be products that end users need to specifically understand, but should become infrastructure hidden behind real business—like internet protocols.

At another level, USDGO’s choice to start from Asian enterprise cross-border business and emerging markets is also not accidental.

Compared with the relatively unified financial markets in Europe and the U.S., cross-border capital flows in Asia, Africa, and Latin America face more friction. For example, local currency exchange-rate volatility, insufficient banking coverage, inconsistent clearing times across regions, complex FX conversion steps, and added costs and delayed delivery caused by intermediary banks.

OSL’s emphasis on Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America as key application markets, and its focus on USDGO being used for cross-border fund transfers, trade finance, enterprise treasury management, e-commerce, and interactive entertainment scenarios, is because demand for dollar assets in these regions is already very clear, but the cost for enterprises to obtain dollar liquidity, complete cross-border payments, and manage funds in transit is often higher than in mature financial markets.

From this perspective, the value stablecoins provide here is not only faster transfer speed. It also includes unifying funds across different regions into a chain-based dollar asset that can flow 24/7—for example, the no-spread USD exchange, free subscriptions and redemptions, and 7x24全天候 support offered by USDGO, along with additional participation incentives for ecosystem partners, are intended to help participating enterprises further reduce financial frictions and opportunity costs, achieving genuine cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

3. From $1 billion to $10 billion: what do enterprise stablecoins really need to outperform?

On the surface, OUSD looks more like a global stablecoin alliance jointly built by large institutions, while USDGO looks more like a suite of enterprise digital dollar services already operating in regional markets.

The two currently validated aspects are also different.

OUSD has made attempts to bring large financial institutions, payment companies, and technology platforms back to the discussion table about stablecoin governance and economic models, but it has not yet proven whether more than 140 participants can truly form a unified, efficient, and continuously operating distribution network. USDGO, meanwhile, has already proven that a newly issued enterprise stablecoin can accumulate $1 billion in circulation in a relatively short period and actively expand into different markets and scenarios. It still needs further proof that these funds can enter the payment, settlement, and enterprise finance cycles in a long-term, stable way.

Overall, moving from $1 billion to $10 billion is not simply about issuing 9 times more. What really needs to happen is a layered transformation: from funds entering the system, to funds flowing continuously, to enterprises forming usage dependency.

Therefore, the competition for the next phase of enterprise stablecoins requires watching not only market capitalization and circulation, but also the following dimensions.

First, beyond circulation size, more important is the quality of funds.

After all, for example, how many enterprises does the $1 billion come from? Is the capital concentrated in a few institutions or platforms? Do enterprises hold it as long-term operating funds, or is it mainly short-term allocation and ecosystem incentives? Only when the sources of funds become increasingly diversified and form stable enterprise balances does the circulation size truly have durability.

Second is actual usage efficiency.

After funds are minted, they must truly flow. A stablecoin with $1 billion in circulation but most of the funds sitting idle for long periods is fundamentally different from a stablecoin with $1 billion in circulation that is continuously used for supplier payments, merchant settlement, cross-border receipts, and enterprise funds aggregation. Their commercial value is completely different.

Then there is liquidity and redemption capability.

Enterprise stablecoins often need to handle not just small transactions of hundreds of dollars, but fund flows of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Whether large subscriptions and redemptions go smoothly, and whether the price spread between different stablecoins and fiat stays stable, determines whether enterprises will be willing to treat it as a routine tool.

If an enterprise needs to prepare multiple conversion and redemption plans in advance for a single payment, then stablecoins have not truly reduced the complexity of fund management—they have only shifted that complexity from the banking system onto the blockchain. Therefore, for enterprise stablecoins to become a routine tool, they must build sufficiently deep liquidity, stable fiat rails, and a subscription/redemption system that can handle large fund in-and-out.

Finally, it is the sustainability of the business model and the ability to expand globally.

Whether it is the reserve-asset收益 sharing model of OUSD or the incentive-and-service system built around ecosystem partners by USDGO, both have to face changes in interest-rate cycles, and also deal with differences across regions in licenses, data, KYC, anti-money-laundering, sanctions screening, and fiat rails.

This means enterprise stablecoin competition will not simply be a replica of the market share fight between USDT and USDC. It is more like a competition of comprehensive capabilities—issuance and reserves are just the starting point. The endgame is whether payments networks, bank channels, customer relationships, liquidity, technical integration, and regional compliance can all be combined into a single system.

Written at the end

Every industrial transformation has gone through similar stages.

The market is still enthusiastically discussing “who will do what,” but the real change has already quietly crossed the original tipping point:

• The appearance of OUSD is absolutely an important milestone for enterprise stablecoins moving toward maturity. It means the “enterprise stablecoin” track has truly entered the mainstream vision of global financial institutions;
• At the same time, USDGO has also used its $1 billion in circulation over half a year to prove that enterprise stablecoins can be issued, held, and also provide the baseline liquidity needed to support large payments;

But $1 billion is still only a new starting point.

From $1 billion to $10 billion, what truly needs to be crossed is the full chain from “being issued” to “being held,” and from “being held” to “being continuously used,” enabling OUSD or USDGO to keep entering the cycle of trade, payments, and enterprise treasury finances.

Perhaps in the future, only when the digital dollar becomes as natural as a bank interface—such that enterprises no longer even need to know which stablecoin lies underneath—will it truly shift from being a crypto asset to becoming an infrastructure for global commerce.