Open USD Splits Stablecoin Reserve Earnings Across 140 Partners

Open Standard, a coalition of more than 140 financial firms, formally launched Open USD on June 30, 2026, a dollar-pegged stablecoin that Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, Ripple, Stripe, and Google have signed up to back. The token is scheduled to go live later in 2026 on Solana from day one, with additional blockchains including Stellar, Base, and Polygon planned for the rollout.

The headline feature is the revenue split. Open Standard will hand all earnings from Open USD’s reserves to the 140-plus partners, after a small management fee that covers operational costs. That arrangement turns every payments processor, exchange, and merchant acquirer in the network into a stakeholder with a direct financial reason to push OUSD over USDC or USDT, a structural shift the incumbents were quick to notice.

• $298 billion current total stablecoin market cap, per Messari data
• 4 chains planned: Solana native day one, plus Stellar, Base, and Polygon
• More than 140 launch partners on day one
• $1.5 trillion: what BNY expects stablecoins alone to reach by 2030
• 8% to 13%: Circle’s share-price move on the day Open USD was announced

Three Design Principles, One Industry Split

Open Standard distilled the initiative into three commitments. Businesses will mint and redeem Open USD at no cost, with no artificial limits on volume. Partners will receive all of the earnings from the stablecoin’s reserves, less the management fee. The token will be operated by Open Standard, an independent company whose board is made up of Open USD’s partners, so governance decisions land in the collective interest instead of at a single issuer’s roadmap meeting.

Open Standard framed the trio as a direct response to what it calls three structural flaws in the existing stablecoin market: prohibitive mint and redeem fees for businesses moving money at scale, the inability of partner companies to share in the reserves’ yield, and the lack of recourse when third-party issuers’ roadmaps do not match the needs of developers building on top. Open Standard’s CEO, Zach Abrams, said businesses “currently face fees for minting and redeeming tokens, have limited access to reserve yields, and depend on roadmaps set by a single issuer,” describing the gap Open USD is designed to close, in the launch blog announcing Open USD.

• Build for scale: businesses mint and redeem Open USD at no cost, with no artificial volume limits.
• Earn by default: partners receive all earnings from the stablecoin’s reserves, less a small Open Standard management fee.
• Govern collaboratively: Open Standard’s board is composed of Open USD’s partners, with decisions taken in the collective interest.

The Revenue Split Is the Structural Move

Zero-fee minting is what grabbed the headline. The consequential change is the redistribution of the reserve yield. Existing stablecoin issuers, with Tether and Circle as the dominant examples, earn the bulk of their profit by holding the dollars that back each token in short-term Treasuries and other safe assets and keeping the resulting interest. OUSD’s reserve earnings flow to the partner network instead. Every bank, payments processor, and crypto exchange in the coalition now has a structural reason to route enterprise customers toward Open USD and away from issuers that keep the yield for themselves.

Fireblocks, an institutional custody and infrastructure provider, has signed on as a key partner. Quarterly stablecoin volume across its payment customers runs to roughly $76 billion in business-to-business payments, $19 billion in merchant settlement, $13 billion in stablecoin payouts, and $2 billion in issuer and acquirer settlement between banks, per its note on the Open USD launch. Open USD is positioned to sit on top of that activity from day one.

BNY is also in the launch group, and its head of products framed the move as a long-term bet. The bank’s Chief Product and Innovation Officer, Carolyn Weinberg, said a stablecoin with neutral governance and shared economics “has potential to unlock the next phase of digital assets growth,” and BNY expects stablecoins alone to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2030. Weinberg’s figure is a stated forecast, attributed to BNY.

Stablecoins are a breakthrough technology, and realizing their potential requires a common framework for moving value across the digital economy. Open USD helps create that foundation, and Chime is proud to join industry leaders in building the next generation of money movement.

The Chime endorsement, attributed on Open Standard’s launch blog to a Chime representative, captures the appeal for the neobank and fintech cohort: ride an open framework instead of picking a winner between Circle, Tether, and the larger payments networks.

Who Signed On and What They’re Buying

The launch partner list spans every corner of the payments and capital markets stack, with Open Standard’s announcement page laying out the names by category. Card networks Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Fiserv, and Adyen are in, alongside fintechs including Klarna, Affirm, Ramp, OnePay, Brex, and Checkout.com. Banks signed up include entities tied to BNY, Standard Chartered, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Intercontinental Exchange, U.S. Bank, BBVA, Mizuho Financial Group, DBS Bank, and more than 30 others. Crypto and infrastructure participants include Coinbase, Ripple, Bybit, Solana, Base, OKX, Gemini, MetaMask, Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, and Ledger. Earlier in June, Ripple and Coinbase had backed Mastercard’s AI agent payment system built on stablecoins, an arrangement the Open USD launch now extends across the full partner network.

Stripe has gone further than membership. Will Gaybrick, President of Technology and Business at Stripe, said Open USD will become the default stablecoin for businesses on Stripe. Coinbase has said it will integrate Open USD into Base, the layer-2 network built on Ethereum that the exchange operates. Fireblocks, Solana, and a roster of wallets and on-chain infrastructure providers have committed to support the new token at launch. The depth of the backers is a deliberate signal, designed to make enterprise customers comfortable handing OUSD real volume from day one.

Solana First, Then Three More Rails

The Solana confirmation arrived in real time. The Solana account shared the day-one launch on June 30, announcing that Open USD will be issued natively on Solana “from day one,” with the network highlighting the new stablecoin’s “decentralized governance mechanism and zero fees for minting and redemption.” Most of the early volume is expected to flow through that single chain.

The multi-chain plan is broader than the Solana framing. The four initial blockchains named at launch are Solana, Stellar, Base, and Polygon. Spreading tokens across those networks also insulates Open USD from any single chain’s gas and congestion cycles. Stellar opens cross-border and remittance corridors, Base hosts Coinbase’s institutional and consumer products, and Polygon has been the venue for enterprise and bank-pilot integrations.

Gaybrick framed the multi-chain ambition more sweepingly. He said businesses need a stablecoin “designed to work at a global, industrial scale” and “not at the scale of the economy today, but of the 2040 economy,” describing the years ahead as a period of activity “we can only begin to imagine.” That framing is a stated forecast, attributed to Stripe’s president.

The Threat to the Issuer Duopoly

The partner list, as printed on Open Standard’s launch blog, runs for several screens. One name is conspicuously absent: Circle, the issuer of USDC. The omission did not sit quietly. Cryptobriefing reported that Circle’s shares fell between 8% and 13% on the announcement itself, a market reaction that suggests investors read the launch as a near-term competitive risk to USDC’s market share.

The race is asymmetric in size. Tether’s USDT sits at roughly $184 billion and Circle’s USDC trades near $74 billion, per DefiPrime, putting the two incumbents in control of most of the dollars behind stablecoins. BlackRock’s Samara Cohen, Global Head of Market Development, set the tone from inside the challenger camp. Cohen said stablecoins “can play an important role in the evolution of digital markets when supported by trusted infrastructure and practical utility,” and that Open USD is “a constructive step toward giving businesses more choice.” Coinbase’s Chief Business Officer, Shan Aggarwal, was more direct, calling stablecoins “the most important thing happening in payments right now” and saying “the more great infrastructure this industry builds together, the faster we close the gap between what payments are today and what they should be.” The marketing tilt is plain: the partners are pitching Open USD as the rails the existing issuers will have to match.

Gaps Still to Close Before Launch

A stablecoin with 140 logos on the launch page is only as sound as its dollars and governance. Reserve composition, monthly attestations, and the legal structure of Open Standard’s board have to be published in plain terms before any enterprise treasurer moves a treasury balance. The launch blog describes target transaction volumes on a scale “approaching that of the ACH network,” a stated ambition that has not yet been audited.

Regulatory fitness is the gating item for the U.S. market. The 2025 GENIUS Act set out a federal framework for stablecoin issuance that restricts which entities can issue tokens to the public and how those tokens are marketed. Open Standard will need to show that its partner-led structure does not lift it into a securities classification under the same rules, and will have to publish monthly attestations and annual audits the way USDC already does. The European Union’s MiCA regime, which becomes fully binding for stablecoin issuers by July 1, 2026, sets an additional checklist across the bloc, a regulatory pattern detailed in this 2026 stablecoin issuance map.

The token’s launch is the easy part. Whether payments processors, exchanges, and merchants actually route volume to OUSD in 2026, rather than continuing to settle in USDC and USDT, will be the live test of a model whose promise is on the page but whose economics still have to prove out at scale. Open Standard and its 140 partners say they expect to take share from the incumbents; the incumbents have not yet said how they intend to respond.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Stablecoins and digital assets carry significant risk, including the loss of principal. Readers should consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions. Figures cited are accurate as of publication date, July 1, 2026.