Dozens of major companies join Open USD as launch partners

A coalition of more than 140 companies, spanning payments, traditional finance, crypto infrastructure, and big tech, has signed on as launch partners for Open USD (OUSD), a new dollar-pegged stablecoin built to function as shared infrastructure rather than a single company’s product.

The partner list reads like a who’s who of global finance and technology: Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, Ripple, Stripe, Discover, Adyen, and Klarna, among others. Circle, the issuer of USDC, is conspicuously not among them. Its shares fell between 8% and 13% on the news.

How OUSD works, and why it’s different

Open USD is governed by an independent entity called Open Standard, with Zach Abrams serving as interim CEO. The stablecoin offers fee-free minting and redemption with no volume limits. In English: anyone can create or cash out OUSD at a 1:1 dollar rate without paying transaction fees, regardless of how much they’re moving.

Instead of a single company keeping the yield generated by reserves, like Tether and Circle do today, OUSD distributes reserve earnings among its partners. Open Standard takes only a small management fee off the top.

OUSD is scheduled to go live later in 2026 across multiple blockchains, including Solana, Stellar, Base, and Polygon. Early integrations are already locked in. Stripe plans to make OUSD the default payment option for businesses on its platform. Coinbase will integrate it into Base, its layer-2 network built on Ethereum.

The stablecoin market’s power structure is being challenged

For years, the stablecoin market has operated as a near-duopoly. Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC have dominated, with both companies profiting from a straightforward business model: take in dollars, buy US Treasuries and other safe assets, keep the yield, give users a token worth a dollar.

OUSD flips that dynamic. By sharing reserve earnings with the 140-plus partners who actually drive adoption and volume, it creates an economic incentive for those partners to actively prefer OUSD over competitors.

The reaction from Circle’s stock tells the story. An 8-13% drop on the announcement alone suggests investors are taking this seriously as a near-term competitive risk. Circle’s entire value proposition depends on USDC maintaining or growing its market share.

What this means for investors

The multi-chain launch strategy is worth watching closely. By deploying on Solana, Stellar, Base, and Polygon simultaneously, OUSD avoids the Ethereum-centric bottleneck that has historically limited stablecoin utility. Each of those chains serves a different audience: Solana for high-speed DeFi, Stellar for cross-border payments, Base for Coinbase’s ecosystem, and Polygon for enterprise applications.

Reserve composition, audit transparency, redemption guarantees under stress, and the actual legal structure of Open Standard will all matter enormously. A stablecoin backed by 140 logos is still only as good as the dollars and governance behind it.

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