The deep dive
Open USD: a shared-governance challenge to single-issuer stablecoin economics
Open Standard, a newly formed independent organisation, launched Open USD (OUSD) on 30 June with more than 140 initial partners, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, 
BlackRock, 
BNY, 
Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, and IBM. Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams is Open Standard's founding chief executive. The mechanism is the story: businesses mint and redeem Open USD without fees or volume limits, and most of the income earned on the reserve assets backing it flows back to participating businesses after a small management fee, rather than being captured entirely by a single issuer the way Circle captures USDC's reserve yield or Tether captures USDT's. Governance is shared across partner companies instead of sitting with one accountable issuer.
That structure is the direct economic challenge. USDC and USDT are worth roughly what they are to Circle and Tether because the issuer keeps the interest on tens of billions of dollars of short-dated Treasuries and cash. Open USD proposes to give that yield to the businesses that actually move the stablecoin, in proportion to adoption. For the card networks in the initial partner set, that is a materially different commercial calculation than simply accepting stablecoins as a settlement rail: Visa, Mastercard, and Amex are agreeing to a structure where their own adoption of Open USD earns them a direct share of reserve income, which is a genuine balance-sheet commitment rather than a logo on a press release. BlackRock and BNY's participation extends the same institutional-adoption pattern already visible in BUIDL and BNY's own Digital Asset Custody platform: regulated balance sheets are willing to back non-bank dollar instruments when the governance and yield terms favour them directly.
Circle's absence from the initial partner list is the pointed detail. Open USD is not positioned as another stablecoin competing on distribution or chain support; it is positioned as a different answer to who captures stablecoin economics, and Circle is the incumbent that answer is aimed at. The irony is that BNY sits on both sides of this story in the same week: on 29 June it deepened its role as a primary custodian for Circle's USDC, adding direct institutional mint and burn to its Digital Asset Custody platform, and the following day it joined the consortium building the instrument designed to challenge USDC's economics. That is not a contradiction so much as a custodian bank correctly reading that the winning stablecoin model is not yet settled and positioning itself as infrastructure for either outcome rather than picking a side.
JPMorgan's 29 June policy op-ed, published separately from either announcement, reads differently once set against Open USD's design. Umar Farooq and Peter Muriungi warned that stablecoin products offering "yield like incentives or balance holding arrangements" without bank-grade capital, liquidity, and consumer-protection standards risk recreating shadow-banking vulnerabilities, and argued that labelling matters less than substance: a business holding Open USD balances specifically because doing so earns a share of reserve income is, functionally, holding a yield-bearing instrument. Open USD is business-to-business rather than consumer-facing, which narrows the direct read-across, but the regulatory question JPMorgan is pointing at (does a reserve-income-sharing stablecoin need the same guardrails as a bank deposit) is exactly the question Open Standard will have to answer before Open USD can operate under the GENIUS Act's federal non-bank issuer route, or any other accountable-issuer licensing regime built around a single supervised entity rather than a shared-governance consortium.
Hong Kong's FSTB and 
HKMA news the same week is a smaller-scale but structurally clean counterpoint: a jurisdiction closing a legal-certainty question (DLT-maintained debenture registers already satisfy the Companies Ordinance) before opening the harder legislative work (electronic execution, possession and transfer of tokenised instruments), rather than launching a headline consortium first and figuring out the accountable-supervision question after the fact. For the stablecoin race broadly, Open USD's launch without a stated regulatory route is the more common pattern in this space, and the one JPMorgan's op-ed is implicitly critiquing.
Worth watching next
- Whether Open Standard states a regulatory route (GENIUS Act federal non-bank issuer, an EMI-style authorisation, or another route) before Open USD's targeted later-2026 launch, and whether any APAC bank beyond Standard Chartered joins the initial partner set.
- The FSTB and HKMA's second-half 2026 legislative work on tokenised bond document execution and possession/transfer; the output will be the load-bearing dependency for scaled Hong Kong tokenised-bond issuance.
- Whether the BoE and FCA publish worked examples of how enforcement and crisis-intervention decisions are actually escalated between them; the coordination mechanism is described but untested.
- Whether BNY's USDC mint-and-burn capability extends to additional stablecoin issuers, per the bank's stated intent, and which issuer is named next.
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