As more institutions adopt stablecoins, competition increasingly shifts from issuing tokens to determining who controls the underlying infrastructure and network.
Unlike most existing stablecoins, Open USD will allow companies to create and trade tokens without fees while returning reserve income to participating partners, minus management fees. Governance will also be shared among members rather than controlled by a single issuer.
The model targets one of the fundamental economic aspects of the current stablecoin market. Issuers such as Circle earn revenue by investing the reserves backed by their tokens in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds and retaining most of the interest earned on these assets. Instead, Open USD plans to distribute this yield to participating companies.
The approach resembles the Global Dollar Network (USDG), a stablecoin consortium led by Paxos that shares reserve revenue with participating companies. This network is backed by companies such as Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy Digital, and was designed to encourage broader adoption by aligning incentives between the issuer and distribution partners.
In Europe, a group of banks and payment providers has launched Qivalis, a company aiming to develop a euro-denominated stablecoin as financial institutions seek to build a shared digital payments infrastructure.
The scale of support for Open USD reflects this change. Beyond Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard and Visa, launch partners include BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, US Bank, Shopify, Google, IBM, Mercado Pago, Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, MetaMask, Aave, Solana, Polygon and Ripple.
