140 Bosses Walk Into a Stablecoin Bar, Circle's Stock Runs Out the Back 🏃💸

Open Standard unveiled Open USD (OUSD), a US dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by more than 140 financial, payments, technology and crypto companies and scheduled to go live later this year, the consortium said Tuesday. Founding CEO Zach Abrams said the initiative was created to address limitations businesses face with existing stablecoins. "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.

The partner list includes Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, U.S. Bank, Coinbase, Bybit, OKX, Ripple, Crypto.com, Fireblocks, MetaMask, Aave, Solana, Polygon, Stellar, Shopify, DoorDash, Google, IBM and MoneyGram, among others. Open Standard, the independent company governing OUSD, said businesses will be able to mint and redeem the token at no cost and with no artificial limits on volume, and that partners will receive the earnings generated on the stablecoin's reserves.

The launch sent shares of Circle Internet Group (CRCL) tumbling more than 16% on Tuesday to $63.63, leaving the stock down 39% over the past month, before shares recovered 2.44% to $64.18 in premarket trading as of 11 am UTC on Wednesday, according to Yahoo Finance. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said on X that the company welcomed "continued innovation and competition in the space," adding that it would soon expand support for both US dollar-pegged and non-US dollar stablecoins, and that it looked forward to "remaining laser-focused on building the best stablecoin infrastructure possible and driving more customer and partner success."

Allaire also pushed back on aspects of OUSD's model, arguing that USDC's decade of integrations, liquidity, regulatory approvals, banking relationships and reserve management give it a structural network advantage that is difficult to replicate. He questioned whether permanently offering free, unlimited minting and redemption would remain sustainable at scale and warned that returning nearly all reserve income to partners risks "starving an infrastructure."

Analysts were divided on the threat posed to the Circle-Tether duopoly. Bernstein wrote in a research note that OUSD could become the "strongest and first new entrant to challenge the duopoly of Circle and Tether," pointing to its reach across payments, banking, technology and commerce, while flagging governance, operational architecture and the revenue-sharing formula as open questions and noting that Circle spends close to $500 million on marketing, infrastructure, technology and compliance. ARK Invest Director of Research Lorenzo Valente was more skeptical on X, calling the announcement a "giant" letter of intent and writing that "the partners are backing rivals: Stripe owns Bridge and has its own stack, Coinbase is wedded to USDC, banks are building their own deposit tokens and the card networks support every token out there."

Stripe President of Technology and Business Will Gaybrick said Open USD would become the default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe, while Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said governance, interoperability and trust would be essential as stablecoins become more deeply integrated into the global financial system. The current stablecoin market exceeds $312 billion, according to DefiLlama, and is projected to reach up to $4 trillion by 2030. OUSD will launch later this year under US law following President Donald Trump's signing of the GENIUS Act, which established a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins and is awaiting final rules from federal authorities.