Open USD (OUSD) is a jointly-governed, revenue-sharing stablecoin launched by Open Standard, a new independent organisation backed by more than 140 companies including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, and IBM. Where incumbent payment stablecoins concentrate reserve income with a single issuer, Open USD distributes most of that income back to participating businesses after a small management fee, and governance is shared across partner companies rather than held by one issuer. Announced 30 June 2026 with a launch targeted later in the year, Open USD is the most structurally significant new entrant to the payment-stablecoin category since the GENIUS Act settled the US federal perimeter, because it challenges the economics of stablecoin issuance itself rather than competing on distribution or chain choice. For a tokenisation operator, Open USD is the first major test of whether a shared-governance, revenue-sharing model can out-compete the single-issuer model on the terms that actually matter to the businesses using the rail.
What it is
Open Standard is the independent organisation that will issue and govern Open USD, with Bridge co-founder and chief executive Zach Abrams serving as Open Standard's founding CEO. Businesses that join Open Standard mint and redeem Open USD without fees or volume limits, use it as a core payment asset within their own products, receive technical and integration support, and earn revenue based on the stablecoin's adoption. Nearly all of the interest earned on the reserve assets backing Open USD flows to partner businesses after a management fee, rather than being captured entirely by the issuer, which is the structural break from the USDC and USDT model.
Named participants
The initial partner set spans payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express), payments infrastructure (Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv), asset managers and banks (BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, U.S. Bank, BBVA), crypto-native firms (Coinbase, Bybit, OKX, Ripple, MetaMask, Aave), and technology and commerce platforms (Google, Shopify, DoorDash, IBM). Tempo, a blockchain network whose chief executive Matt Huang has said Open USD will be natively issued on Tempo from day one, is a named launch-network partner; Open Standard has not said whether Tempo will be the exclusive network for native issuance. Open USD is designed to be blockchain-agnostic and is expected to run initially on Coinbase's Base, Ethereum, Solana, and Tempo.
Circle, the issuer of USDC, is notably absent from the initial partner list, consistent with Open USD's positioning as a direct economic challenger to the single-issuer reserve-yield model USDC represents.
Why it matters
The card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex) joining a stablecoin whose reserve income they will share is a structural signal that the networks see stablecoin rails as complementary to card economics rather than purely a threat to interchange revenue, provided they can capture reserve yield rather than cede it to a single issuer. BlackRock and BNY's participation extends the same institutional-adoption logic already visible in BUIDL and BNY's Digital Asset Custody platform: major regulated balance sheets are willing to put weight behind non-bank dollar instruments when the governance and yield-sharing terms are favourable. Standard Chartered's participation is the clearest APAC-adjacent signal in the initial partner set, though the consortium's design and initial network choices (Base, Ethereum, Solana, Tempo) are US/global-infrastructure-led rather than APAC-specific.
Open questions
- Whether Open USD will pursue GENIUS Act federal-non-bank issuer status in the US, EMI authorisation in the EU, or another jurisdictional route, and how the shared-governance structure maps onto a licensing regime built around a single accountable issuer.
- The exact revenue-sharing formula and how it is expected to compare with Circle's or Tether's issuer-side yield capture.
- Whether Tempo becomes the exclusive native-issuance network or one of several from launch.
- Whether any APAC bank beyond Standard Chartered joins ahead of the targeted later-2026 launch, and what that would signal for the stablecoin race across SGD, HKD, JPY, and KRW-denominated instruments.
Related
- Circle for the incumbent single-issuer model Open USD is structured against.
- BlackRock, BNY for the institutional-adoption angle.
- Standard Chartered for the APAC-adjacent signal.
- US GENIUS Act for the US federal stablecoin perimeter Open USD would need to slot into.
- Stablecoin types for the payment-stablecoin category.
- Reserve attestation for the reserve-composition and yield-distribution question.