Visa, Mastercard, and 140 Firms Launch Open USD Stablecoin

A coalition of over 140 financial and technology heavyweights, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Coinbase, officially unveiled Open USD on Tuesday, a new dollar-pegged stablecoin designed to challenge the market dominance of Circle and Tether.

The initiative is managed by an independent entity called Open Standard, and its structure directly targets the revenue model that has made Tether and Circle the sector’s leading issuers. Trading under the ticker OUSD, the token is engineered so businesses can mint and redeem it without any fees and with no volume restrictions.

The most significant departure from the status quo lies in how the reserves are managed. Instead of a single issuer pocketing the interest, nearly all of the earnings from the assets backing OUSD will flow to partners, with only a management fee deducted. This model attacks the very foundation of the incumbent business. Reserve income,the interest banks pay on the cash and Treasuries held as collateral,generated the vast majority of Circle’s revenue last year.

The list of founding partners reads like a who’s who of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Ripple, Google, and Shopify are all on board. Zach Abrams, co-founder and CEO of the Stripe-owned infrastructure firm Bridge, will serve as Open Standard’s founding CEO. He stated in the launch announcement that while existing stablecoins have strengths, scaling them requires something that is “open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests.”

Open Standard’s governance is also unique. The board is composed of consortium partners, a structure the group describes as collective rather than controlled by a single company.

The market reacted swiftly and negatively to the news. Circle shares dropped sharply on the announcement day, with multiple outlets reporting a decline of 15 to 17 percent. The sting is particularly acute because some of OUSD’s backers, including BlackRock and BNY, are also core partners in Circle’s own ecosystem. The venture effectively pulls familiar institutional names onto a competing platform.

However, the competitive math remains steep. According to data cited from CoinDesk, Tether’s USDT held roughly 62 percent of the stablecoin market in April, with Circle’s USDC at around 25 percent. Analysts were quick to caution that the sell-off might have been overdone. One Ark Invest researcher publicly doubted that Open USD could unseat Circle, arguing that the incumbent’s distribution advantages are difficult to replicate.

The launch also arrives in a transformed regulatory environment. The GENIUS Act, signed into US law in July 2025, established a federal framework for payment stablecoins and has since opened the floodgates to new entrants. This framework has shifted the sector from a crypto sideshow to a serious fight for the plumbing of corporate payments. The involvement of the two largest card networks underscores how seriously the establishment is taking it.

For Visa and Mastercard, the move fits a broader hedging strategy. Mastercard’s recent acquisition of stablecoin firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion signaled how far the networks are willing to go to own a slice of tokenized settlement. The wider institutional land grab is well underway, from banks probing the trust gap with big tech to Wall Street’s race to tokenize, exemplified by JPMorgan’s tokenized money-market fund on Ethereum.

Open Standard has not committed to a firm launch date beyond 2026, but the token is expected to go live later in the year. Whether OUSD becomes a genuine third force or simply a bargaining chip against Circle’s pricing, the message from the consortium is clear: the most profitable part of the stablecoin business,the reserve float,is now openly contested.