More Than 140 Financial, Crypto, and Fintech Companies Launch Open USD, a Joint Dollar Stablecoin

More than 140 companies have announced Open USD, a joint dollar stablecoin project that brings together payment networks, asset managers, crypto firms, and fintechs. For high-risk merchants and PSPs, the point is not the name; it is the attempted creation of a shared settlement rail with free issuance and redemption, no transaction volume limits, and a structure that could route value through a very large coalition.

1. Participants include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Google, Coinbase, Bybit, OKX, Ripple, and MetaMask. The roster also includes Solana, Crypto.com, Fireblocks, Gemini, Aave, Tempo, eToro, Galaxy, Ledger, Trust Wallet, Morpho, EtherFi, Privy, Bitget Wallet, Stellar, Polygon, Aptos, and Plasma.
2. The project is built around Open USD, a dollar stablecoin that its backers say will allow free issuance and redemption with no limits on transaction volume. For payment businesses, that combination matters because it is the kind of design that can support large-scale on- and off-ramping without the usual friction around caps.
3. Governance is assigned to an independent entity, Open Standard. Its board will be made up of representatives from participating companies, but the individual names have not been disclosed yet. The group says part of the income generated from Open USD reserves will be distributed to organizations that use and promote the stablecoin.
4. Open Standard says fees collected through the project will be used to develop it further and to keep it aligned with U.S. legal requirements. That is the operational detail PSPs will care about: the project is explicitly presenting itself as a compliance-facing infrastructure effort, not just a token launch.
5. On the market side, shares of Circle, issuer of the second-largest dollar stablecoin by market capitalization, fell more than 13% after the Open USD announcement and continue to decline. Earlier in June, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe were reported to be exploring a shared stablecoin platform, with Coinbase potentially involved, as the U.S. considered the CLARITY bill, which among other things regulates stablecoin yield.