Circle's stock drops 16% as 140+ firms say "Open USD" to a new stablecoin party 🪙

A coalition of more than 140 companies, including Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BlackRock, unveiled Open USD (OUSD) on Tuesday through a newly formed independent operator called Open Standard, sending shares of USDC stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL) down nearly 16% to a recent $63.99, according to Yahoo Finance. The decline extends Circle's slide to 39% over the past month. Coinbase, a key Circle partner, is among the Open Standard backers.

Open Standard is led by founding CEO Zach Abrams, previously founder of Bridge, the stablecoin company acquired by Stripe. The group said businesses will be able to mint and redeem OUSD for free with no volume caps, that partners rather than the issuer will collect the bulk of earnings on reserves after a management fee, and that governance will be held by a board drawn from partner companies. "Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that's open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests," Abrams said in a statement.

The backer list spans payments giants Visa, Mastercard, and American Express; banks including BlackRock, BNY, and Standard Chartered; tech firms such as Google and Shopify; and crypto companies including Coinbase and Ripple. BlackRock's Samara Cohen called the project "a constructive step toward giving businesses more choice," while BNY projected the broader stablecoin market could grow to $1.5 trillion by 2030. Open USD is expected to go live later this year.

Separately, Ripple said Monday that developers can begin testing the XRPL Lending Protocol in a sandbox environment, with two technical specifications, XLS-65 and XLS-66, set to add native credit infrastructure to the XRP Ledger for institutional borrowing and lending.

In a separate development, the Linux Foundation on Thursday launched Akrites alongside 19 founding organizations, including Amazon, Anthropic, Citi, Google, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI, to coordinate the patching of critical open-source software before AI-powered attackers can exploit it.