Mastercard, Stripe, Visa and Coinbase Back Open USD, a Stablecoin That Changes How Reserve Income Is Shared

On Wednesday, Sep. 30, a 140-member consortium called Open Standard launched Open USD, or OUSD, with backing from Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and Shopify. The important part is not the token itself — it is the economics: reserve earnings are designed to flow back to participating businesses, minus a management fee, instead of sitting mostly with the issuer.

1. The original stablecoin model was simple: customers exchanged dollars for tokens, the issuer held the reserves in highly liquid assets, and the yield on those reserves became the business. Once supply reached the tens of billions of dollars, issuance looked like a very efficient financial machine.
2. OUSD changes that setup. Open Standard says the reserve income generated by the dollars backing the token is meant to be returned to participating businesses, while the issuer keeps only a management fee. That matters for any company bringing a token into wallets, merchant checkout, corporate treasury, cross-border payments, or other financial workflows.
3. Businesses can mint and redeem OUSD at par without fees or artificial volume limits. That is the practical hook: if a PSP, platform, bank, or commerce player is actually distributing the asset and moving the volume, Open Standard is trying to give that player a direct economic reason to care about the token’s adoption.
4. The pitch is a direct challenge to the standard stablecoin playbook. Instead of a central issuer capturing most of the yield, Open Standard is telling distributors to participate in the economics when their customers use the currency. In stablecoin land, that is not a small wording tweak; it is the business model.
5. The broader fight is still about rails. The report frames the question as public rails run by new issuers outside the banking system versus private rails run by banks and networks, modernized but still inside the regulated system. Stablecoins push the first answer, while tokenized deposits and the SWIFT ledger push the second. The GENIUS Act gave the first route real momentum and pulled in names like BlackRock, but legitimacy is not the same thing as direction.

For high-risk PSPs, the operational point is simple: custody, reserves, compliance, minting and redemption are increasingly handled behind the scenes. The scarce asset is distribution. OUSD is built to make that distribution layer itself part of the economics, which is exactly where payments companies tend to care.