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Open Standard unveiled Open USD (OUSD) on June 30 with backing from more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Coinbase, Ripple, Google, Shopify, Bybit, OKX, and Standard Chartered. The stablecoin will be operated by Open Standard, an independent company whose board consists of the consortium’s partners rather than a single controlling issuer.
Introducing Open USD: a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it.https://t.co/jqgDRs6mKf
— Open Standard (@openstandard) June 30, 2026
The structural inversion is the entire point. Every dominant stablecoin today — Tether’s USDt (USDT), USDC (USDC), and the wave of bank-issued tokens that followed them — operates on a model where the issuer collects the interest income generated by reserves and keeps it.
OUSD distributes nearly all of that reserve income back to the partner companies that adopt and grow the token, after a small management fee. A business that integrates OUSD into its payment flows does not just gain a settlement asset; it gains a direct financial stake in the token’s growth.
The pitch to corporate adopters rests on three design principles:
The presence of Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe is the detail that demands the most scrutiny. These are the incumbent payment networks whose existing infrastructure has historically extracted fees from exactly the kind of cross-border settlement OUSD is designed to displace.
The logic resolves once the revenue-sharing structure is understood. Rather than fighting stablecoin disintermediation, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are positioning themselves to capture a share of the reserve economics that stablecoin issuance generates, while simultaneously using their existing merchant and consumer networks to drive OUSD adoption.
It is a hedge disguised as a product launch: If stablecoins displace card rails over the next decade, the three largest payment networks in the world will own a piece of the replacement rather than watching it happen from outside.
BlackRock’s involvement signals the reserve backing will likely route through institutional-grade short-term instruments similar to its BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund, though Open Standard has not detailed the specific reserve composition.
Coinbase’s participation gives OUSD an immediate path into crypto-native trading and custody infrastructure that fiat-only consortium members lack on their own.
OUSD will launch natively on Solana from day one, a deliberate choice given Solana’s transaction throughput and the network’s accumulating institutional credibility across 2026, including integrations from State Street, SoFi, Western Union, and now Moody’s credit ratings going onchain. Open Standard has not detailed which additional chains will support OUSD at launch, though a consortium of this scale will almost certainly expand multichain quickly.
BREAKING: Open USD is launching natively on Solana from day one.
A new shared stablecoin, owned and governed by its partners. No mint or redeem fees, no volume caps, and nearly all the reserve economics flow back to the businesses building it. https://t.co/s4WJ89DA9B pic.twitter.com/eWyK0JsLmB
— Solana (@solana) June 30, 2026
The list of companies not participating is almost as notable as those that are. Circle, Tether, and PayPal, three of the largest dollar stablecoin issuers, are absent from the consortium. That is unsurprising, as each operates a single-issuer model in which reserve income is retained by the issuer. OUSD takes a different approach, redistributing most reserve earnings to participating partners, placing it in direct competition with the incumbent stablecoin model.
The consortium also has a strong South Korean presence for a US-led initiative. Members include Samsung Electronics, Hanwha Group, Dunamu, Shinhan Financial Group, KB Kookmin Card, and four additional Korean card networks, suggesting South Korea will be an important launch market alongside the United States.
Open Standard has not announced a launch date beyond targeting later in 2026. However, the breadth of institutional support assembled before OUSD entered circulation is the announcement’s defining feature, underscoring the industry’s growing interest in a shared, partner-governed stablecoin model.
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