Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase Back a Revenue-Sharing Stablecoin

A group of more than 140 financial and technology companies launched Open Standard, a consortium that plans to issue a dollar-pegged token called Open USD later this year. Named participants include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Ripple and payment processors that together handle a large share of global card volume.

The design breaks from the incumbent model. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem Open USD without fees or volume limits, and most of the income earned on the token's reserves will be distributed to participating companies after a management fee, rather than retained by an issuer. Governance will belong to an independent organization shared among partners. The token is intended to run across several chains, beginning with Coinbase's Base network, Ethereum and Solana.

The target is explicit. Circle's USD Coin, with about 73 billion dollars in circulation, and Tether, near 184 billion dollars, keep the interest earned on their Treasury-bill reserves. Open USD proposes to return that yield to the merchants and platforms whose activity creates the reserves, within a total stablecoin market of about 310 billion dollars.

The sound-money question is whether shared governance can hold up once reserves must actually be managed. A token's safety depends on the assets backing it and on the party that can freeze or redeem it. Distributing yield widens the appeal, but it also multiplies the number of firms with a claim on the reserve and a say in a crisis. The first real test will come when redemptions rise sharply and the consortium must act together.