Open USD Stablecoin Launches With Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase as Backers

The Open Standard has launched its Open USD (OUSD) stablecoin, arriving just three months after the initiative was first announced with over 140 partners. That network has since expanded to more than 200 participants, including 52 banks that account for nearly a quarter of the total. Founding investors steering the organisation number five: Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe, and Visa. Zach Abrams is leaving his chief executive role at Stripe-owned Bridge to lead the Open Standard as full-time CEO.

Four of the five founding partners (Coinbase, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa, with Shopify the exception) are providing distribution at launch. OUSD enters the market with a reported $468 million in market capitalisation, with BlackRock, BNY, and Lead Bank holding its reserves. Lead Bank carries a prior relationship with Stripe’s Bridge on stablecoin card products. Supported use cases span settlement, payment orchestration, trading, foreign exchange, wallets, and card issuance.

The original proposition centred on distributing substantially all reserve earnings to partners, net of a small management fee retained by the Open Standard. The current framing has shifted modestly: platforms using OUSD the most receive nearly all underlying earnings rather than earnings being shared across partners uniformly. That adjustment, alongside broader governance changes since June, is worth tracking as the network scales and partner incentives become more material.