Circle Stock Falls After Coinbase, Visa Back Rival Stablecoin

Open USD (OUSD), a new stablecoin backed by more than 140 companies including Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BlackRock, launched this week to build shared payments infrastructure that no single issuer controls. The announcement sent Circle's stock down nearly 16% in a single session, underscoring how markets are pricing the competitive threat to incumbent stablecoin issuers.

At a Glance

• Open USD was unveiled Tuesday by a new independent operator called Open Standard, led by CEO Zach Abrams.
• More than 140 companies are backing the coin, spanning payments networks, banks, tech firms, and crypto exchanges.
• Circle shares fell roughly 16% on the news, extending a 39% decline over the past month, per Yahoo Finance data.
• Businesses will mint and redeem OUSD for free with no volume caps, and partners rather than Open Standard alone will collect reserve interest.
• The coin is expected to go live later this year, with BNY projecting the broader stablecoin market could reach $1.5 trillion by 2030.

What Open USD Changes About Stablecoin Economics

The mechanics here matter more than the branding. Existing stablecoin models, most notably Circle's USDC and Tether's USDT, generate revenue by holding reserve assets, largely short duration Treasuries, and keeping the yield for the issuer. That model has worked well for Circle in a high rate environment, but it has also drawn criticism from the businesses that actually route volume through these tokens without capturing any of the economics.

Open USD flips that structure. Partners, not Open Standard, collect the earnings on reserves, minus a management fee. Minting and redemption come with no fees and no volume caps, which directly targets a complaint that has followed the sector as transaction volumes have scaled: issuers charging for access to liquidity that partners themselves are generating through distribution.

Governance Structure and the Coalition's Composition

Rather than sitting under one corporate parent, OUSD will be governed by a board drawn from partner companies. Organizers describe this as the mechanism that will determine whether the coin achieves broad adoption, since a shared governance model reduces the incentive for any single participant to extract disproportionate value from the network.

The backer list is unusually broad for a stablecoin launch. Payments networks Visa, Mastercard, and American Express sit alongside banks BlackRock, BNY, and Standard Chartered. Tech firms Google and Shopify are involved, as are crypto native players Coinbase and Ripple. That composition mirrors the internet infrastructure analogy executives are using publicly: BlackRock's Samara Cohen called the effort