01. What is Open USD?

Open USD is run by Open Standard - an independent company not owned by any single partner, led by Zach Abrams (co-founder of Bridge, which was acquired by Stripe). Technically, OUSD is still a fiat-backed stablecoin just like USDT or USDC: deposit real money, receive a token; redeem the token, get real money back; reserve assets are held by US financial institutions under existing regulation. The difference lies in three design choices.

02. Why would rivals share one balance sheet?

The core argument behind Open USD, laid out by economist Christian Catalini in Forbes, is fairly counterintuitive: issuing a stablecoin, by itself, creates no additional economic value beyond the distribution capability a company already has. Circle and Tether make money mainly by keeping the interest earned on reserve assets (mostly US Treasury bills), while distribution partners (exchanges, wallets, payment platforms) - the ones actually putting tokens in users' hands - get only a small cut or nothing at all.

The direct consequence: Circle (CRCL) shares fell nearly 16% on the day Open USD's news broke, as the market repriced the risk to Circle's business model - a fee-free stablecoin that shares back nearly all its reserve interest, backed by USDC's own largest distribution partners (Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase), is essentially competing directly on the exact thing that gives USDC its value: distribution network.

03. Where does traditional payments actually slow down?

To understand why stablecoins settle faster, you need to separate two concepts often conflated as one: sending a payment instruction and settlement (money actually changing hands). SWIFT - a network of more than 11,000 financial institutions across 200 countries, running since 1973 - is only a messaging system. It doesn't move money; it sends instructions to "debit this account, credit that account" between banks. Real money moves through a chain of correspondent banks holding nostro/vostro accounts (an account one bank opens at another bank to hold foreign currency) for each other.

04. Why blockchain settles faster and cheaper

The core difference is that blockchain replaces five separate ledgers with one shared ledger - blockchain itself isn't a technological miracle, just a different way of organizing who keeps the books. When transferring a stablecoin, no correspondent bank needs to reconcile balances with the next one, because both sender and receiver read the same ledger state. The transfer is recorded once, directly, confirmed by the entire network at the same time, instead of sending a message and waiting for each party to update its own books.

"One ledger" here doesn't mean a single server sitting somewhere. A blockchain network still has thousands of independent computers (called nodes) run by parties who don't know each other - the difference is that all those nodes are forced to hold an identical copy, instead of each bank keeping its own book and reconciling later. What actually explains the speed of settlement is the mechanism that forces thousands of strangers' computers to agree on the same number.

Three technical factors combine to produce the 100-1,000x cost gap and multi-dozen-fold speed gap that the US Federal Reserve (Fed) and the BIS have measured:

05. Who's actually using Open USD

Visa says its own stablecoin settlement volume had reached an annualized run rate of roughly $7 billion by mid-2026, and Visa together with Bridge (Stripe) expanded their stablecoin-linked card program to more than 100 countries starting March 2026. On 6/3/2026, Mastercard announced support for settlement in regulated stablecoins (USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD), including same-day and weekend settlement cycles - something traditional card networks can't do because they depend on banking hours. Mastercard is also acquiring BVNK (stablecoin payment infrastructure) in a deal worth up to $1.8 billion.

06. What's still limited - stablecoins don't erase all friction

On-chain speed doesn't mean the entire money journey is fast. Both ends of the transaction - where fiat converts into tokens and back again (on/off-ramp) - still have to go through traditional banks, still subject to banking hours and KYC (identity verification). Stablecoins remove friction in the middle (cross-border value transfer), not at either end.

The regulatory framework is also far from unified globally: the US has the GENIUS Act governing reserves and issuers, the EU has MiCA, while many emerging markets - where capital controls are tight or there's no dedicated stablecoin framework yet - still treat digital money flows under existing foreign-exchange rules. The technical speed of an on-chain transaction doesn't automatically mean that transaction is legal wherever the money needs to go.

07. Bottom line

The most balanced view: Open USD is an attempt to turn stablecoin issuance into shared infrastructure, the way card networks once turned card swiping into a shared utility across millions of issuing banks - a payments infrastructure layer, not the "digital money that replaces banks" that many imagine. Faster, cheaper settlement is a real technical benefit, already measured in real money by Visa and Mastercard; but the reserve, legal, and governance risks of any stablecoin - even one with 140 companies' names on it - still need to be checked individually. A long partner list doesn't automatically exempt it from those risks.