Open USD: Why 140 Companies Backing This Stablecoin Crushed Circle's Stock

On June 30, more than 140 of the world's largest companies, from Visa and Mastercard to BlackRock and Stripe, announced a new dollar stablecoin called Open USD. Within hours, Circle's stock dropped as much as 17% in a single session, according to market data from TradingView. That reaction tells the real story. Because this isn't just another digital dollar: it's a direct assault on the business model that made Tether and Circle rich.

Introducing Open USD: a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it.https://t.co/jqgDRs6mKf

— Open Standard (@openstandard) June 30, 2026

What Happened on June 30

The consortium is called Open Standard, and its stablecoin is ticker OUSD. The founding list reads like a who's who of global finance and tech: payment networks Visa, Mastercard and American Express sit alongside asset manager BlackRock, banks including BNY, Standard Chartered, BBVA and DBS, crypto-native firms Coinbase, Aave, MetaMask and Solana, and tech giants Google, Shopify and DoorDash. Leading the venture is Zach Abrams, co-founder of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company that Stripe acquired for over $1 billion.

Stablecoins are transforming how value moves, and interoperability is the key to institutional scale.

We're proud to join Open USD as a day-one integration partner, reinforcing Ripple's commitment to open, multichain infrastructure that supports institutional adoption across the… https://t.co/6BymTXdElJ

, Ripple (@Ripple) June 30, 2026

A full launch is expected before end of 2026, native on Solana and then extended to other networks. But the signal landed immediately, and markets read it without ambiguity.

Why It Matters: The Fight Is Over the Float

Here's the core of the story. A stablecoin is backed by dollar reserves, typically invested in short-term Treasuries, and the interest those reserves generate is the issuer's treasure chest. Circle earns roughly 95% of its revenue from that source alone, according to the company's SEC filings. It's the “issuer keeps the float” model, the same one that built the fortunes of Tether and Circle alike.

Open USD flips that entirely. No fees to mint or redeem, no volume caps, and critically, almost all reserve yields are returned to partner companies, minus a small management fee. In practice, instead of handing the float to the issuer, the companies actually routing the volume keep it. The model looks far more like a payment network such as Visa than a traditional stablecoin issuer, and it targets exactly the weak point of a market where USDT holds roughly 62% share and USDC around 25%, per CoinGecko data from April 2026.

Two Returns That Say Everything

Two names on the founding list speak louder than any press release. The first is Coinbase. Back in 2018, Coinbase co-founded the Centre Consortium with Circle, the governing body behind USDC, which was dissolved in 2023 after Circle paid over $200 million in stock to reclaim full control. Now Coinbase is back inside a consortium model, but this time with 140 co-members and yield-sharing baked in by design, and its distribution agreement with Circle is due to expire in August. That timing is itself a negotiating signal.

Open USD just launched. A new stablecoin backed by Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, and 140+ other partners.@andyyy says we're underestimating how big this is by an order of magnitude.

"I wouldn't be surprised if this gets to $10, $20, $30 billion. I wouldn't be… https://t.co/YPfRT0uNJP pic.twitter.com/MdTFxjotCf

, The Rollup (@therollupco) June 30, 2026

The second is Ripple, which is keeping its own RLUSD but joined OUSD as a day-one integration partner, positioning its ledger as one of the possible settlement rails. It's the same calculated strategy behind Ripple's regulatory positioning across jurisdictions: collect transaction flow regardless of which stablecoin ultimately wins. Meanwhile Europe is building its own path, with efforts such as Crédit Agricole's EURXT on Ethereum pointing toward a parallel dollar-free settlement layer.

The Downside: 140 Partners Is Both a Strength and a Risk

Caution is warranted, and analysts are split. Dragonfly Capital has described the partner list as a genuine threat to Circle's business, but with a clear caveat: consortia are notoriously hard to run and tend to fracture, because aligning the incentives of 140 companies is genuinely rare. Others have called the market reaction overblown, pointing to existing consortium models such as Paxos's Global Dollar Network that never shifted the competitive landscape in a meaningful way.

There's also an uncomfortable precedent nobody mentions willingly. Libra, Meta's stablecoin project, launched with an equally star-studded consortium and collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The difference this time is regulatory context: the GENIUS Act has provided clear rules, and the partners are regulated payment processors, not only tech companies with no financial licenses. But the real proof is singular, and it's not the logo count. It will be how many of those 140 partners actually route live volume through OUSD rather than the stablecoins they already use. That test begins only at launch. The full framework is available on the Open Standard website and in Circle's SEC filings.