Open USD is not live yet, but its pitch is already aimed at Circle's most valuable line of business: the reserve income behind USDC. When Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, and more than 140 partners line up behind a stablecoin that shares that income, you should pay attention.
Circle earned $652.5 million in reserve income in the first quarter of 2026, according to its SEC filing. That's the pressure point. Open USD is built around the idea that the companies distributing stablecoins should keep more of the money generated by the assets sitting behind them.
Open Standard announced Open USD, or OUSD, on June 30 with a coalition that reads like the payments industry's contact list: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Coinbase, Ripple, Google, Shopify, DoorDash, and more than 140 partners in total. Zach Abrams, cofounder of Bridge, is the founding CEO of Open Standard. Stripe agreed to acquire Bridge in 2024 and completed the deal in February 2025, with TechCrunch putting the price at $1.1 billion.
OUSD is expected to launch later in 2026. Open Standard says businesses will be able to mint and redeem it with no fees or volume caps, while most reserve revenue goes back to participating companies after a management fee. Tempo and Solana have both been named among the launch networks, with other chains expected to follow.
Look at the economics. USDC's model lets Circle earn interest and dividends on reserve assets, then share some of that income through distribution agreements. Open USD flips the pitch. If a bank, card network, merchant platform, or fintech is moving hundreds of millions of dollars through stablecoins, OUSD offers a cleaner answer: distribute the token and participate directly in the economics. That is not a small difference.
Circle's exposure is written in its filings
Circle reported $2.7 billion in total revenue and reserve income for 2025, up 64% from the prior year. In the first quarter of 2026, reserve income made up 94% of its total revenue and reserve income. The company ended March with $77.0 billion of USDC in circulation, while total revenue and reserve income for the quarter reached $694.1 million.
This is the hard part for Circle. It has been trying to grow other revenue lines, including subscription and services revenue, transaction revenue, fund management fees, and developer infrastructure. Those lines are growing, but they aren't yet close to replacing the reserve engine. In the same March quarter, Circle's total other revenue was $41.6 million. Reserve income was more than 15 times larger.
CoinShares said in a July report, covered by CoinDesk, that Open USD is the most credible threat yet to Circle's USDC because it attacks the distribution economics rather than just launching another dollar token. That's the right read. A new stablecoin with no liquidity is usually noise. A new stablecoin backed by card networks, banks, crypto exchanges, merchants, and Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure is a different kind of problem.
Circle's stock fell more than 16% after the June 30 announcement, according to The Block, and traded as low as about $63. That move was blunt. Investors were not reacting to a finished product, because OUSD has not launched. They were reacting to the possibility that Circle's partners and would-be partners now have a reason to ask for better economics.
Why this consortium gets taken seriously
There have been plenty of attempts to build shared financial infrastructure, and many of them die in committee. The coordination problem is real. Every bank has its own compliance process, every network its own incentives - and every fintech wants control over the customer relationship.
Open USD has one thing those efforts often lack: a simple financial reason to join. Open Standard says OUSD will be governed by an independent company with collaborative governance, not by a single issuer that can change terms on its own. It also says reserves will be managed at major financial institutions under U.S. regulatory requirements. For companies that don't want their stablecoin strategy tied entirely to one fintech's balance sheet, that matters.
Frankly, Visa and Mastercard appearing in the same consortium says enough. These are direct competitors in card networks. They don't usually line up together unless the underlying shift is large enough to make shaping the standard more attractive than watching someone else define it.
USDC still has the real advantage today. It has liquidity, exchange integrations, DeFi usage, corporate treasury adoption, and years of operating history. You don't replace that with a press release. But stablecoins are no longer a crypto side street. They are becoming payment infrastructure, and the companies that already dominate payments don't want to stand by while an independent issuer collects most of the rent.
That is the story. Open USD may stumble on launch details, governance, regulation, or adoption. Circle may respond by sharing more economics with distributors. The open question is not whether OUSD kills USDC. It is whether Circle can keep earning issuer-level margins once the biggest distributors have a credible alternative in their own hands.
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