Open USD: Visa and Mastercard's Stablecoin Attack

The stablecoin business has a simple, lucrative secret: issuers hold billions in reserves, earn the interest on them, and keep it. A new coalition wants to blow that model up. Open Standard, a consortium of more than 140 enterprises including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and Coinbase, announced Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-pegged stablecoin that hands nearly all of the reserve interest back to the businesses that mint, hold and route the token. Launching natively on Solana, OUSD is a direct attack on the economics of USDT and USDC, and the market took it seriously enough to knock 17% off Circle's stock in a day.

• Open USD (OUSD) is a new dollar stablecoin from a 140-plus enterprise consortium including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and Coinbase.
• It shares reserve yield with users, returning nearly all the interest to businesses that mint and hold it, instead of the issuer keeping it.
• It launches natively on Solana, targeting the same payment and settlement use cases as USDC and USDT.
• Circle's stock fell 17% in 24 hours on the news, a measure of how directly OUSD threatens USDC's model.

What is Open USD, and why is it different?

It is a fully-backed dollar stablecoin whose novelty is not the peg but the payout. Like USDC or USDT, each OUSD is meant to be redeemable for a dollar and backed by cash and cash-equivalent reserves. The difference is what happens to the interest those reserves earn. In the standard model, the issuer keeps that yield, which on tens of billions of dollars of reserves is an enormous, low-effort revenue stream, essentially free money for holding other people's cash. OUSD flips it: by design, nearly all of that interest flows back to the businesses that mint, hold and route the token, turning the stablecoin from a cost of doing business into something that pays its users. That single change is aimed straight at the profit engine of the incumbents.

RelatedMiCA Goes Live, Tether's USDT Delisted in Europe

Why does the backer list matter so much?

Because these are the companies that move the world's money, not crypto startups. A consortium of 140-plus enterprises anchored by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and Coinbase is not a group that needs crypto to be legitimate, it is the payments and asset-management establishment deciding to build its own stablecoin rather than rent one. Visa and Mastercard operate the card rails, Stripe processes payments for much of the internet, BlackRock is the largest asset manager on earth, and Coinbase is a primary on-ramp. Between them they have distribution, regulatory heft and balance-sheet credibility that Tether and Circle cannot match. When incumbents of that weight coordinate on a shared token with better economics, it stops being a fringe experiment and becomes a structural threat, which is exactly why the market reacted the way it did.

Why did Circle's stock drop 17%?

Because OUSD attacks the exact thing that makes Circle valuable. Circle's business is built on issuing USDC, roughly $73 billion in circulation, and earning interest on the reserves behind it, so a well-funded rival offering the same dollar with the yield handed back to users threatens both USDC's growth and the margin on its existing float. Investors did the math quickly: if businesses can hold a stablecoin that pays them instead of one that does not, the competitive pressure on USDC's economics is immediate, and a 17% single-day drop is the market pricing that in. It is worth noting the coin has not launched yet and reserve-sharing coins face their own regulatory questions, but the reaction shows how exposed a single-issuer, keep-the-yield model looks the moment a credible, better-aligned alternative appears.

What are the catches?

Several, and they are not small. First, coordination: a coin built around a 140-member coalition has to answer who is actually committed and what participation means in practice, and consortiums are notoriously slow and prone to competing interests. Second, regulation: a stablecoin that pays yield to holders wanders toward looking like a security or a money-market product in some jurisdictions, and it lands amid a tightening rulebook, US regulators are floating bank-grade KYC for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act, and Europe's MiCA just forced compliance on the whole market. Third, it is an announcement, not a live product, with a native Solana launch slated for later this year, so execution risk is real. A better economic model on paper still has to survive governance, regulators and the unglamorous work of shipping.

RelatedThe CLARITY Act Hits the Senate Floor This July

Our take

OUSD is the most serious challenge the incumbent stablecoins have faced, because it does not attack them on trust or technology, it attacks them on economics, which is where they are most exposed. The keep-the-yield model was always a quiet windfall that survived mainly because holders had no better option, and the moment a coalition with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and Coinbase behind it offers the same dollar that pays you back, that windfall starts to look indefensible. Circle's 17% drop is the market admitting as much. The heavy caveats are real: this is an announcement, consortiums move slowly, and yield-bearing stablecoins invite regulatory scrutiny that could blunt the whole advantage. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. Once someone credible offers better economics for the same product, the pressure only runs one way, and even if OUSD stumbles, it has already forced the question the incumbents least wanted asked: why should the issuer keep all the interest?

Original analysis by GenZTech. Launch status current as of July 2026. More at The Motley Fool.