A consortium led by Visa, BlackRock, Google and Coinbase, and including more than 140 financial services, e-commerce, technology and DLT players, plans to launch a US Dollar-denominated stablecoin dubbed Open USD later this year. When it goes live, the Open Standard group will challenge existing leaders Circle and Tether, which between them dominate the $300+ billion global stablecoin market.
Open USD is driven by three principles, which seek to overcome shortcomings of existing stablecoins:
- Minting costs: Businesses can mint and redeem Open USD at no cost and with no artificial limits on volume.
- More revenue for participants: Partners receive all of the earnings from Open USD’s reserves, less a small management fee to cover Open USD’s operational costs.
- Shared governance:Open USD will be operated by Open Standard, an independent company with a board made up of Open Standard’s members, so that operational and strategy decisions benefit the collective interest, not a single entity.
Open Standard has appointed Zach Abrams as its Founding CEO. He was the co-founder of stablecoin startup Bridge, which was acquired by payments service Stripe in 2025. Stripe is also a founding member of Open Standard.
Says Abrams: “Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests. We’re thrilled to bring together over 140 businesses to launch Open USD. It’s a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it.”
Other well-known Open Standard founding members include: BNY, Cloudflare, Digital Asset, Fiserv, IBM, Mastercard, Moneygram, Ripple, Shopify, Solana and Stellar. Members will incorporate Open USD into their offerings or support it in various ways, essentially becoming the distribution channels for the stablecoin. In particular, the participation of several DLT providers means that it will be DLT-agnostic.Coinbase joining Open Standard is a big deal because the crypto platform is already partners with Circle, the company it helped create the USDC stablecoin with. Observers say Coinbase is keeping its options open while gaining significant leverage for its upcoming contract renewal with Circle in August. That contract was worth $908 million to Coinbase in 2024.
Open USD’s operations, including its yet-to-be-named issuer, will be regulated according to the GENIUS Act, which became law in July 2025. The legislation, which is overseen by a group of traditional banking regulators, is the first federal law passed by Congress to regulate the digital assets industry.
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