Circle Takes 17% Lunge as 140 Firms Birth a Stablecoin Called "Open USD

Circle (CRCL) shares slid roughly 16–17% on the June 30 session, with the stock recently changing hands at $62.63–$63.99 per Yahoo Finance, notching the largest single-day decline since a 20% drop in March that followed a draft proposal to curb stablecoin yield. The move extended a slide of about 39% over the past month and came on the same day a consortium of more than 140 companies unveiled Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin explicitly positioned as a rival to USDC. Among the backers are Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, American Express, Google, Shopify, Ripple and Anthropic owner partners spanning payments, banking, technology and crypto.

OUSD is operated by Open Standard, a newly formed independent entity led by founding CEO Zach Abrams, who previously founded Bridge — the stablecoin company acquired by Stripe. Open Standard said businesses will be able to mint and redeem Open USD for free with no volume caps, that partners rather than a single issuer will collect the earnings on reserves net of a management fee, and that governance will sit with a board drawn from the project's 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. BlackRock's Samara Cohen called the effort "a constructive step toward giving businesses more choice," while BNY projected the broader stablecoin market could swell to $1.5 trillion by 2030; Open USD is expected to go live later this year.

Market participants drew a direct line between the announcement and Circle's decline. Matthew Sigel, head of digital research at asset manager VanEck, echoed that the backer list raised concerns about Circle's market position, while Sam Ruskin, an investment associate at Reciprocal Ventures, said: "This will either force Circle to continue their revenue share agreements, find new distributors for USDC (although nearly everyone interested in stablecoins today is backing OUSD). Whatever way you cut it, this seems bearish for Circle." Despite the slide, analysts maintain a consensus price target of $120 on CRCL, implying roughly 91% upside from current levels.

The launch adds to competition that has intensified since the GENIUS Act passed in 2025; over that span, Tether's USDT market share slipped from 62% to 59%, while Circle's USDC share rose from 19% to 25% before easing to 24% in 2026. Separately, Ripple said developers can begin experimenting with the XRPL Lending Protocol in a testing environment, where specifications XLS-65 and XLS-66 are intended to introduce native credit infrastructure to the XRP Ledger. The Linux Foundation also launched Akrites on Thursday with 19 founding organizations — including Amazon, Anthropic, Citi, Google, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI — to coordinate patching of critical open-source software before AI-powered attackers can exploit it.