A new stablecoin is launching with one of the broadest backer lists the sector has seen. Open Standard announced Open USD, a stablecoin supported by a consortium of more than 140 financial and crypto companies.
Key Takeaways
- Open Standard launched Open USD, a stablecoin backed by a consortium of 140+ companies.
- Partners can mint and redeem at no cost and share in the reserve earnings.
- Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, and Coinbase are among the backers.
- It’s governed collaboratively by its partners rather than a single issuer.
The notable part isn’t the token itself, plenty of dollar-pegged stablecoins already exist, but the governance and economics built around it, which aim directly at the structural complaints businesses have long had about existing stablecoins.
What Open USD Actually Is
At its core, Open USD is a new stablecoin built for global money movement, a dollar-pegged token designed to move value across borders and across the internet economy. Three design principles define it. Businesses can mint and redeem Open USD at no cost, with no artificial volume limits. Partners receive all earnings from the underlying reserves, minus a small management fee, rather than the issuer alone capturing the yield those reserves generate. And the stablecoin is governed collaboratively through Open Standard, an independent company whose board is composed of Open USD’s own partners rather than a single controlling entity.
Each of those targets a specific pain point with existing stablecoins: minting and redemption fees that get prohibitively expensive at scale, businesses being shut out of the reserve earnings, and limited recourse when a third-party issuer’s roadmap doesn’t serve a business’s needs. Zach Abrams, Founding CEO of Open Standard, framed the launch around that gap: “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.”
Introducing Open USD: a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it.https://t.co/jqgDRs6mKf
— Open Standard (@openstandard) June 30, 2026
The Biggest Names, and Why Each One Matters
The backer list is what gives the launch its weight. A few stand out for what they specifically bring:
- Visa and Mastercard: the two dominant global card networks. Their participation signals that traditional card rails see stablecoin infrastructure as complementary to their business rather than a threat.
- Stripe: one of the largest payment processors globally. Because Stripe sits directly in the checkout flow for a huge share of internet commerce, its involvement gives Open USD a path into everyday consumer and merchant transactions, not just institutional settlement.
- BlackRock: the world’s largest asset manager, and the clearest institutional credibility signal on the list. It already manages tokenized fund products, so this extends that posture into stablecoin infrastructure.
- BNY: one of the world’s largest custodian banks, handling trillions in assets under custody. Its presence matters for institutional trust in how the reserves backing Open USD would be held.
- American Express and Discover: rounding out the major card networks, meaning all the dominant US card brands are aligned with this single effort rather than building competing ones.
- Coinbase: the largest US-based crypto exchange and a key on-ramp, giving Open USD direct distribution into crypto-native users.
- Ripple and Solana: major blockchain infrastructure players rather than payment companies, signaling Open USD is built for multi-chain deployment rather than tied to one ecosystem.
- Western Union and MoneyGram: the two largest global remittance firms, targeting the cross-border money-movement use case where stablecoin speed and cost advantages are most pronounced, especially in emerging markets.
Several executives put the launch in their own terms. Mastercard’s Jorn Lambert, Chief Product Officer, framed it as an infrastructure philosophy: “The technologies that changed the world, from the internet to mobile networks, succeeded because they became shared infrastructure that anyone could build on.” BlackRock’s Samara Cohen, Global Head of Market Development, called it “a constructive step toward giving businesses more choice in how they access tokenized value and participate in internet native digital rails.” And BNY’s Carolyn Weinberg, Chief Product and Innovation Officer, offered the announcement’s most specific market-size claim: “We anticipate that stablecoins alone may grow to $1.5 trillion by 2030.”
The Banking Coalition Behind It
Beyond the headline names, the partner list includes a striking number of major regional and national banks spanning nearly every continent: Standard Chartered, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, DBS, U.S. Bank, BBVA, Mizuho, Westpac, Itaú, OCBC, and dozens more. That breadth is itself a signal. Open USD isn’t positioning as a US-centric or Western-centric stablecoin, it’s assembling distribution across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa at the same time, through established banking relationships in each region.
What It Could Mean Across the Crypto Sector
The mechanics, free minting, shared reserve earnings, and partner governance, land differently depending on where you sit.
For businesses building on stablecoins, this is who the model is built for. Free minting at scale plus a share of the reserve yield flips the economics: instead of paying an issuer that keeps the interest on the float, partners capture part of that yield themselves. At high volume, that’s a real shift in who profits from the reserves.
For existing issuers, it’s competitive pressure. The market is dominated by a few issuers that keep the reserve yield, a model the GENIUS Act reinforces by barring them from paying interest to holders. Open USD attacks exactly that, sharing yield and dropping fees. With its backers’ distribution, it pressures issuers competing only on being early or regulated.
For investors, the honest read is that Open USD is infrastructure, not a token to speculate on. The signal isn’t “buy Open USD”; it’s that the biggest names in payments and asset management are converging on stablecoins as shared infrastructure. What’s worth watching is second-order: the publicly traded backers with stablecoin exposure, and whether consortium models like this accelerate payment volume moving onto stablecoin rails.
For everyday users, the impact is indirect, cheaper, faster transactions if Open USD reaches the checkout flows, exchanges, and remittance corridors its backers run. With Western Union and MoneyGram on the list, cross-border transfers in emerging markets are where ordinary users would see the clearest benefit.
The Throughline: Infrastructure, Not a Product
The consistent theme across the quoted executives is infrastructure neutrality. BlackRock frames it as business choice, BNY frames it as a market-size opportunity that justifies institutional support, and Mastercard frames it explicitly as a continuation of how the internet itself succeeded, through open, shared, interoperable infrastructure rather than a closed, single-company system. That shared framing across a card network, an asset manager, and a custodian bank is the clearest indication of what Open USD is trying to be: less a product competing on features, and more a shared utility layer governed by the businesses that use it.
Whether it delivers on that is the open question. The pitch, collaborative governance, shared reserve economics, and free minting, is a direct answer to what businesses have disliked about incumbent stablecoins. But a consortium that asks more than 140 companies, including direct rivals like Visa and Mastercard, to align on governance and economics is also a coordination challenge, and its success will depend on execution, not just the strength of the backer list. For now, the sheer breadth of that list is the story.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Consult a professional before making investment decisions.
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