Visa, Stripe and 140 others back new Open USD stablecoin to challenge Tether

Open Standard LLC will mint a new dollar-denominated token, Open USD (OUSD), through a consortium exceeding 140 counterparties — Visa, Stripe, BlackRock, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, BNY Mellon, Standard Chartered, Google, Shopify, IBM, Coinbase, Ripple, OKX, MetaMask, Klarna, Affirm, DoorDash, Western Union, and MoneyGram among them. Issuance is scheduled for later in 2026, natively on Tempo, the payments chain aligned with Stripe. The collateralization and revenue architecture inverts the issuer-retained model now standard at Tether and Circle.

Reserve economics and mint mechanics

Mint and redemption fees: zero. Volume caps: none disclosed. Fiat-equivalent reserve yield: partners retain the majority, less a management fee routed to Open Standard. The framework departs from the existing convention in which the issuer absorbs interest income on reserves backing the token. Founding CEO Zach Abrams — co-founder of Bridge Ventures, which Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2025 — positioned the design around enterprise-scale utility rather than issuer profitability.

Incumbent position and competing entrants

As of April, Tether's USDT accounted for roughly 62% of stablecoin supply and Circle's USDC approximately 25%, per CoinGecko figures cited in coverage of the announcement. Circle's share price fell about 13% on the disclosure. CEO Jeremy Allaire responded on X: "We welcome continued innovation and competition in the space." Tether issued no public comment in available reporting.

The OUSD coalition lands inside a broader institutional push. Klarna launched KlarnaUSD in November; Amazon and Walmart have signaled issuer interest. Paxos deployed USDG via the Global Dollar Network in late 2024, backed by Mastercard and Robinhood. Earlier in June, a JPMorgan-led bank group announced a shared on-chain deposit network. All entrants operate against the regulatory baseline set by the Genius Act, signed in July 2025.

Points to verify at launch

• Reserve composition and attestation cadence — frequency and auditor identity will set transparency parity versus USDT and USDC.
• Tempo throughput and finality under nominal load, given the consortium's payments-rail membership.
• Management fee versus partner yield-share, in basis points — undisclosed in the initial release.
• Secondary-market depth for OUSD against USDT and USDC pairs; the liquidity delta will define arbitrage cost.
• Tether's response in reserve disclosure cadence or issuance pacing once OUSD approaches go-live.