Circle and Tether are undefeated.

Competitors like Paxos and the USDG consortium (by Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy) tried to compete by offering shared yield and more partners. Circle weathered the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate, and Signature; Tether has had active runs on it. And yet here they are. Two for-profit businesses have beaten every challenger, consortium, and market event.

Today, 140 companies agreed to share a coin.

But they're not trying to defeat the stablecoin champions. OpenUSD is built for the customers and payment flows that don't use stablecoins today and that is a different fight, on a different part of the board, for money that has been standing on the sidelines the entire time.

Let me explain the sidelines, because the sidelines are the entire story.

Quick map of where this goes:

📣 Weekly Rant: The Coin Nobody owns

OpenUSD is a dollar-backed stablecoin, run by an independent company called OpenStandard with Zach Abrams as interim CEO, backed by a roster that reads like a ceasefire between people who normally try to put each other out of business.

Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase. BlackRock. ICE, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. Checkout, Google, Samsung. Heck, even the letter A section of companies reads like a list of people who compete with Stripe or Visa. Adyen, Airwallex, Amex. A hundred-odd banks, processors and wallets behind them.

Open Standard is the new company formed to run and operate OpenUSD. It describes OpenUSD as open infrastructure, designed to give businesses "the economics, governance and reliability they need to move money." What that means in practice is:

These companies certainly have distribution, but so does the regular US Dollar, Circle, and Tether. In order for this to have a meaningful market impact, it needs adoption and distributors to use the thing.

The question underneath the entire launch is why the institutional money and the largest payment flows still do not use stablecoins, when stablecoins have been around for years and plainly work.

1. Stablecoins' business model monetizes the wrong thing.

Eric Saraniecki, who runs network strategy at Digital Asset, spoke about this on a recent Tokenized episode. Saying that outside of Tether, stablecoin issuers make money on the float, the interest earned while your dollars sit in their reserve, and he called that an existential problem for the business model. "It should be oriented around velocity," he said, the way Visa earns on interchange every time a card is tapped. The float model and the velocity model pull in opposite directions, and the float is the one the issuers are built on.

2. Mint burn fees are unworkable for capital markets use cases.

In the same episode Theo Golden, who heads digital assets at Baillie Gifford, which manages serious institutional money, explained the problem. A few basis points might be survivable for a payment. For a trade it is nonsense. "The idea that I would take a 5-10 basis point haircut on a position, particularly when I'm fighting for a single basis point, is not comprehensible."

3. Issuers are forced to vertically integrate and become networks.

Squeezed on both float and fees, an issuer gets pushed to vertically integrate, to own more of the product stack where the durable margin actually sits. And the moment it does, the one thing it needs to be stops being possible. As Noah Levine, a partner at a16z put it (in an episode that really was a banger) "Once you do that, does that limit your ability to be a network? You're effectively competing with players that otherwise would be supporting the growth of your stablecoin."

4. Banks don't like funding competing balance sheets

A bank, whose entire job is to be a balance sheet, is not going to settle its flows across a coin whose issuer is being driven by its own survival math to compete with it. Banks are understandably protective of their core asset, deposits. Those deposits fund their lending activity. In that lens, stablecoin issuers look more like competitors than partners. But an open bit of infrastructure that they can be a part of looks more like market structure, more like SWIFT, Visa, TCH, or EWS.

5. Risk or the perception of it is still too high for institutions.

Circle came through three bank failures in a week. The catch is in how. When SVB went down, USDC traded to around 88 cents, and it climbed back to a dollar because the US government decided SVB's depositors would be made whole. A treasurer notices both halves of that. It survived, and it survived because someone bailed out the bank, which is not a number you can put in a risk model for next time. And in the interim, every dollar was valued at $0.88.

The structural exposure has not moved. A single issuer holds one reserve, concentrated by definition, with no orderly wind-down if a third of the holders head for the exit on the same morning. It survived the last run. Nobody can promise it survives the next one at par, and "probably survives" is not a sentence a CFO can build a settlement layer on.

Every one of those problems traces back to the same root: a for-profit issuer forced by its own survival math to compete with the network it needs. Take the profit motive out, and the knot unravels.

The long-term revenue problem only bites if you're trying to earn on the float, and OpenStandard isn't. The reserve yield goes back to the distributors who hold and move the coin, and OpenStandard keeps a small operating fee and nothing more. Banks already know how to work with a utility built like that.

Because it isn't chasing float, Theo's desk is never asked to hand over five basis points to settle. The thing that made stablecoins a non-starter for capital markets and large dollar transactions gets designed out at the default, for everyone, instead of waived deal by deal for whoever has the leverage to ask.

And because it isn't hunting margin, it never has to climb the stack. It never turns into a PSP, or a network, or a competitor to the players carrying it. The moment that made banks nervous, the issuer becoming a rival, simply never arrives. Governance sits with a board no single company controls, so no chain and no distributor gets the inside lane, and the thing stops looking like somebody's product and starts looking like SWIFT, Visa, TCH or EWS. A bank can hold a piece of that without making a rival's coin more valuable every time it sends a dollar.

That takes care of the competition. Risk gets answered a different way, by spreading it. A single issuer piles everything into one reserve on one balance sheet. OpenUSD spreads it, across a wider mix of reserves and across backers whose survival has nothing to do with the coin. BlackRock. Visa. Mastercard. Banks. A bad day in stablecoins barely registers for them. For Circle it's the whole company. None of this makes a run impossible, nothing does. It makes the thing standing behind the coin big enough, and broad enough, that the treasurer who walked away from a single issuer takes the meeting. Nothing is risk-free and this isn't either. It's lower risk, structurally, because the two things that scared the treasurer, the concentration and the wait for someone to bail out the bank, are the two things being designed out.

Sometimes it feels like there are more stablecoins and tokenized deposits than there are companies left to issue them. 

JPMorgan has JPMD. PayPal's run PYUSD for years. M0 helps companies like MoneyGram issue their own, Deel has DLUSD, then KlarnaUSD, SoFiUSD; the list goes on. In isolation, these all make sense for those companies. Your own stablecoin, in your own ecosystem, helps you monetize your user base better. Why give away the float to a bank when you could earn it. Or if you're a bank, why not offer the same instant 24/7 capability as stablecoins but with much less perceived and real risk.

A thousand coins is where this is heading, and that's fine. Good, even.

The trouble starts the second one of them needs to talk to another. JPMorgan's coin can't settle with PayPal's. PayPal's can't settle with a balance locked inside Stripe. Every one of them works beautifully inside its own walls and goes nowhere outside them, because the whole point of a closed loop is that it's closed. A world of a thousand stablecoins is a world of a thousand currencies that don't speak the same language.

And sure, you could swap them. But who swaps them, on what venue, for what price?

A dollar should be a dollar.

We needed one thing. A universal translator. One neutral asset that every closed loop can settle into and out of, that works precisely because nobody owns it, and everyone does, that's neutrally governed, which means nobody sitting in the middle is anybody's competitor.

And it's lowkey surprising nobody did this until now. 

And I think the banks get this too. That's why you see Qivalis in Europe, and now, OpenStandard in the US, leading with banks involved in the ecosystem. That's why JPMorgan put JPMD live on Base last year.

But as good as JPMD is, it won't be the coin two institutions settle between. The moment Goldman pays Citi in JPMD, both of them are settling on JPMorgan's balance sheet, and the biggest bank alive is sitting in the middle of its rivals' trades. The old solution to this was a central clearing counterparty (think TCH, a central bank). But for a dollar, that's global, instant and 24/7, that model doesn't work the same. Stablecoins can go to anywhere with compatible software.

So the translator can't be anyone's liability. It has to be a stablecoin. Reserved, 1:1 backed, and intentionally not monetized on float, but a utility where the incentive is on velocity. 

It's open, because nobody owns it.

It's low risk, because no single balance sheet is holding it up.

Distribution alone is not enough.

USDG had Robinhood and Kraken and went almost nowhere. 

A hundred and fourty logos can sign a press release and still leave you with a coin nobody moves. So the question isn't how many names are on the list. It's where the first real volume comes from, and whether it turns up without anyone being talked into anything.

The first place traction is already coming from is the existing Fintech companies who wanted something with better economics. For example, Ramp:

Here's where I think OUSD will focus next:

Acquiring settlement. When Visa settles with an acquirer like Stripe, that's already dollars moving between two institutions, and today it moves the old way, when the banks and Fedwire are open. Run it across OpenUSD instead, and every card payment at a Stripe merchant can be settled instantly.

Institutional cross-border flows. For most banks, correspondent banking sucks. Even the ones that profit from it. If you're outside the top 20 banks, or you're a Fintech company, you're just another customer of the bank paying high fees, and dealing with delays. No matter how good your compliance is or if you're a direct member of SWIFT. Use OUSD, and what starts as a payment message can settle 24/7, instantly, across borders for lower fees.

Cash settlement in financial markets. The Iran conflict changed how Wall St views weekends. Hyperliquid (the DeFi derivatives blockchain and market) saw its oil futures volume spike roughly 250x, to nearly $2bn a day, as weekend volatility became a reality. Cue, every trader calling their banks and exchanges to get the same capability. The problem is, traditional infrastructure can't settle that fast. And, as we mentioned, stablecoins today were prohibitively expensive for that kind of trade.

Of course, the jury is still out. OUSD just announced, and what we don't know is if all of those logos turn into users and volume. If it does, it has to at least be more than the current stablecoin volume, and in reality should be significantly more. Anything less is, well, failure innit? 

If you want the strongest case against OUSD, it comes from the one person with the most reason to make it. 

Jeremy Allaire wrote a long, generous note to Circle's investors about OUSD. He's the champion. He's earned the right to say why he stays the champion, so he did:

In Q1 2026, he says, pointing to Artemis data, USDC did nearly $30 trillion in onchain transactions, around 80% of all dollar stablecoin volume. USDT took the other 20%. Every other dollar stablecoin combined, all of them, rounded to roughly zero. Most of what circulation they have, he says, runs "through promotions and incentives." Mint and burn fees can be negotiated away via contract, and getting 140 companies to agree on anything is extremely difficult. And if they do, will there be enough funding for infrastructure?

These are all valid criticisms. 

But they’re ones finance knows well, and has plenty of evidence overcoming.

While Circle claims 80% of stablecoin transaction volume, OUSD is going for the transactions that avoided going onchain. The quadrillions that are not yet there. Liquidity begets liquidity, and the banks, payments companies, and networks have plenty of that. Mint and burn fees shouldn’t be something you have to negotiate. They exist to prevent certain negative onchain behavior, but the type of behavior that is far less likely in institutional-grade capital markets or payments industry flows. 

And finance has plenty of success cases for consortia. SWIFT, TCH, DTCC, Early Warning Services, and perhaps the most successful, Visa and Mastercard. Each of these got the incentives right for the largest organizations to participate and have been able to fund the rails just fine. If there’s a critique of each of these, it is that they’re bigger closed loops, the very thing crypto was supposed to fix.

Yet, here they are, working with multiple blockchains, PSPs, competing networks, and more.

Finally, there’s depository risk. "Depository risk" is the exposure you take when you hold a token that's a claim on an issuer's reserves rather than a bearer asset in your own custody. This is the real enterprise hangup. If stablecoins become settlement plumbing, you'd be routing systemic payment volume through a token whose risk profile is a single issuer's balance sheet dressed up as risk-free cash.

OpenUSD has a much broader base of much larger balance sheets to pull from.

Finally, Alex in his tweet pointed out interoperability and the reality of fees as being two huge motivators. Interoperability with global banks, payments systems, and the ability to settle directly with Visa is a huge bonus. He also fears issuers jacking up redemption fees as their yields compress. That’s existential to his business case.

Ultimately, to grow a market, you need things that move the market forward. Be that in scale, risk prevention, or approach. And that future, larger market is incredibly unlikely to be one-coin-fits-all. So Circle and Tether will be fine. But not the be-all and end-all.

The pragmatist and the idealist in me are in constant conflict. The idealist has always been drawn to the vision of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Decentralization. But the pragmatist knows you can’t build a future on idealism alone. You need to get the incentives and tech capabilities right.

Circle and Tether are undefeated at what they do.

In fact. I think Tether is quite confident in that.

I think OUSD is trying to be something else entirely. Circle is a pioneer; we owe it a debt of gratitude for normalizing onchain payments, for making them grown-up enough for enterprise. We saw in online video the proprietary standard Macromedia Flash gave way to HTML5 and H.264. That change helped YouTube, Netflix, and even Disney+ scale with better unit economics.

Perhaps money on the internet goes the same way.

The first was Libra, the second was GENIUS, and now, OpenUSD may be the most consequential thing to happen to the technology of money this decade. 

For two years, the stablecoin argument was about price.

Cheaper than cards, cheaper than Swift, a few basis points shaved off a rail. And I argued loudly that was the wrong axis. The value of stablecoins is not that they're cheaper (although they often are), it's that they're better.

Instant, 24/7, global and programmable.

OpenUSD isn't chasing the dollars that already went onchain; it's going after the dollars that were stuck, in a closed loop, in a nostro over a weekend, unable to be programmed.

There's a long road from a list of logos to live volume.

But that road is in front of OpenStandard and OUSD.

The only coin that can belong to everyone is the one nobody is trying to own.

ST.

I advise Tempo, which is adjacent to this story as a chain live on day 1, but as always these views are my own.

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