Open USD Launches With Visa, BlackRock, and Ripple — And Circle’s Stock Just Dropped Nearly 10%

On Tuesday, Stripe’s product lead, Jeff Weinstein, unveiled a new stablecoin project that has already attracted more than 140 companies from the worlds of traditional finance and crypto, including Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase and Ripple. Dubbed Open USD (OUSD), the new project features a structure that diverges from how all major stablecoins actually work.

The Design Behind Open USD 

According to the official announcement, Open USD is built around three core principles. Businesses can mint and redeem the token at no cost, with no artificial volume caps. Partners receive nearly all of the earnings generated by Open USD’s reserves, after a small management fee covers the project’s operational costs. 

And the whole system is meant to be governed collaboratively, run by an independent company called Open Standard with a board made up of the project’s own partners, rather than decisions resting in the hands of a single controlling entity.

Beyond the names already mentioned, it includes American Express, PayPal rival Affirm, and payment processors like Adyen and Fiserv on the traditional finance side. Banking giants BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, and US Bank are also on board, alongside technology firms Google, Samsung Electronics, and Shopify. 

The crypto side of the list includes Bybit, OKX, Solana (SOL), Crypto.com (CRO), Gemini (GEMI), and Aave (AAVE), among dozens of others spanning wallets, custodians, and blockchain infrastructure providers.

A Direct Threat to Circle And Tether?

The structure Open USD is proposing represents a direct challenge to the two companies that currently dominate the stablecoin market. Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT both operate under a single-issuer model, where the company controlling the stablecoin also keeps the income generated by its reserves. 

Circle went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in a $1.1 billion initial public offering (IPO) and recently announced cirBTC, a wrapped Bitcoin (BTC) product that would complete a reserve-asset lineup already spanning the dollar through USDC and the euro through EURC. 

None of that, however, appears to have insulated Circle’s stock from the market’s reaction to Tuesday’s news. Shares of Circle dropped nearly 10% following the Open USD announcement, with CRCL trading around $66 at the time of writing. 

Featured image generated with OpenArt.