A 140-Firm Alliance Backs Open USD, Targeting the Economics That Built Circle and Tether

A consortium of more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and Coinbase, has unveiled Open USD (OUSD), a dollar stablecoin explicitly designed to undercut the revenue model of the incumbents. As crypto.news and CoinDesk report, businesses will be able to mint and redeem OUSD without fees or volume limits, and most of the income earned on its reserves will flow to participating firms after a small management fee, rather than to the issuer.

That inversion directly challenges the current model. Tether and Circle keep the interest earned on the Treasury bills backing their tokens, and that income produces most of their profit. Circle's arrangement is especially exposed, because it paid Coinbase more than $900 million in 2024 to distribute USD Coin. Coinbase's decision to support a rival helps explain why Circle's stock fell roughly 17 percent on the announcement. OUSD is expected to launch later in 2026 on Solana, Stellar, Base and Polygon.

Skeptics urge caution about the coalition itself. CryptoSlate reports confusion over which of the 140-plus named partners are actually committed, the familiar question for any alliance coin. For now the total stablecoin market, at about $309.87 billion in circulation with Tether near $184.09 billion and USD Coin near $73.04 billion, remains controlled by the incumbents, and a broad distributor coalition still has to turn named partners into actual circulating supply.