The card networks’ answer to Circle is called Open USD

A consortium led by Visa and Mastercard has launched Open Standard, a venture of more than 140 businesses issuing a dollar stablecoin called Open USD. Coinbase is among the participants, and Stripe has been reported alongside the group in earlier coverage of the platform. The token is structured to comply with the GENIUS Act, and its economics are the announcement: members can mint and redeem Open USD without cost and without limits on volume.

Read that sentence twice, because it is aimed at somebody. The two companies that dominate stablecoin issuance earn their living precisely where Open USD has chosen to charge nothing.

What was announced

Open Standard is a jointly governed platform, not a product of either network alone. The membership, more than 140 businesses at launch, spans payments, commerce and crypto, with the two card networks as the gravitational centre and Coinbase as the most prominent crypto-native name attached.

The group's stated case for existing is a critique of the incumbents, delivered in the polite register of a consortium press release: existing stablecoins have real strengths, but businesses using them at scale need something "open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests." Each adjective in that sentence maps to a known complaint. Open, against single-company control of mint and redemption. Low-cost, against redemption fees and spread. Aligned to their interests, against the awkward fact that the largest issuers monetise float that their distribution partners generate.

The market they are entering is roughly 313 billion dollars in circulating supply, and the projections the group cites run to 2 trillion by 2030. Two issuers hold most of today's total between them: Tether at about 59 percent and Circle at about 24. Open USD is a bet that the next tranche of that growth can be captured by the businesses that move the volume rather than the companies that mint the tokens.

Why the networks are doing this

Start with what a stablecoin threatens. Visa and Mastercard sit in the middle of card payments, earning on every transaction that crosses their networks. A world where merchants accept stablecoins directly, wallet to wallet, is a world with a route around that toll booth. The networks have answered the way incumbents with strong balance sheets answer: by building the bypass themselves, on terms that keep them in the middle of it.

But there is a nearer-term, more concrete logic, and it is settlement. Both networks have spent years piloting stablecoin settlement, letting issuers and acquirers meet their obligations in tokens rather than wires. Those pilots run today on other people's stablecoins, mostly USDC, which means the float economics and the operational dependencies belong to Circle. A network-governed token converts that dependency into an asset. Every dollar of settlement volume that moves into Open USD is a dollar of reserves whose economics the membership shares, rather than pays away.

For Coinbase the calculus is different and just as sharp. Coinbase earns a share of USDC reserve income under its arrangement with Circle, but it is a passenger on an asset it does not control. A seat at Open Standard is a hedge: whichever token wins institutional settlement, the exchange is inside the tent.

The Circle problem, stated plainly

Nobody at the launch said the word Circle, which is how you know whom the launch is about. USDC built its market share on exactly the constituency Open Standard now courts: regulated businesses that wanted a compliant dollar token and were willing to pay for trust. Its distribution runs substantially through partners, exchanges, processors and platforms, several of which now appear on Open Standard's membership list.

The threat model for Circle is not that Open USD wins consumers. Consumers have never been USDC's base. It is that settlement flows, the deep, boring, recurring volumes between payment companies, migrate to a token the payment companies own, with mint-and-redeem at zero. Circle's moat has always been trust plus integration. The consortium answers the integration half by being made of the integrators, and answers the trust half by wrapping itself in the GENIUS Act's licensing regime. What remains to Circle is execution speed, the multi-chain plumbing it has spent years building, and the fact that consortiums are slow. That may be enough. It is no longer obviously enough, and the market said so in June when reports of the venture first surfaced and Forbes framed the project as the stablecoin built to sink Circle.

The zero-fee economics

A stablecoin that charges nothing to mint or redeem still earns, because reserves earn. Full-reserve dollar tokens hold cash and short-dated Treasuries, and at recent short rates the income on a large supply is substantial; it is the entire profit engine of the incumbent issuers. The consortium's innovation is distributional: rather than the issuer keeping the float, the economics can be shared across the membership, rebated against activity, or used to subsidise the zero-fee promise indefinitely.

That structure has a name in payments history. It is how the card networks themselves began: bank-owned associations running shared infrastructure at cost, before their public listings turned them into toll collectors. Open Standard is, quite literally, Visa and Mastercard re-running their own origin story, this time with a token instead of an interchange file.

The open questions are the ones consortium structures always carry. Who is the issuer of record, and under which licence, federal or state, does it sit? Which chains carry the token, and who operates the mint? How is governance weighted between two networks, one exchange and a hundred and forty other members with unequal stakes? And when a member's interests diverge from the collective, when a large processor wants a feature the networks do not, who wins? The press release answers none of this. The articles of association, when they surface, will be the real launch document.

How settlement would actually migrate

The mechanics of adoption matter more than the branding, so walk through them. Today, a card network settles net positions with issuers and acquirers through settlement banks in each currency. In the stablecoin pilots both networks already run, a participant can meet that obligation in tokens instead, currently, in practice, in USDC. Migrating those flows to Open USD is not a consumer event; it is a treasury configuration change at a few hundred financial institutions, executed one counterparty at a time.

That is precisely what makes the consortium dangerous to incumbents and slow in equal measure. Each member that flips its settlement preference brings recurring daily volume, the healthiest kind of stablecoin demand, uncorrelated with crypto markets. But every flip is a project: custody arrangements, treasury policy, auditor sign-off, regulator notification. The 140 memberships are options, not commitments, and the venture's real adoption curve will be visible only in reserve disclosures, quarter by quarter.

The merchant half of the promise

The word open also gestures at merchants, and there the case is less made. Merchants accept what settles cheaply into the account they already have; they hold what protects their margin. A merchant paid in Open USD still needs fiat for payroll and suppliers, so acceptance depends on the same conversion infrastructure every stablecoin needs, and the consortium's zero-fee promise covers mint and redemption for members, not necessarily the last mile for a shop. If Open USD becomes a merchant asset, it will be because processors on the membership list, the companies that already own merchant relationships, embed it invisibly. Which returns to the founding irony: a token built to bypass intermediaries will succeed exactly as fast as the intermediaries carry it.

Where this leaves Tether

Curiously, the launch may bother the market leader least of all. Tether's 183 billion dollars of supply lives mostly outside the regulated perimeter this token is built for: emerging-market savings, offshore trading pairs, corridors where the counterparty is not a Visa member but a money changer with a phone. Open USD competes for institutional settlement flow, Circle's franchise, not for the informal dollar demand that built USDT. The American licensing question hanging over Tether comes from Treasury's rulemaking, not from this consortium. In the near term, a fee war between Open USD and USDC over regulated volume could even suit Tether fine: its two best-resourced rivals, spending against each other.

The history that argues both ways

Sceptics have a well-stocked archive. Libra, the last consortium stablecoin with famous names attached, collapsed under regulatory pressure before shipping. The European Payments Initiative, a bank consortium built to challenge the card networks on their home turf, spent years shrinking its ambitions. Shared ventures fail when membership is marketing rather than commitment.

But the archive argues the other way too. The card networks themselves were consortiums that worked. Zelle, bank-owned, moves more money than most fintechs combined. And the specific failure that killed Libra, no regulatory category to live in, is the one condition that has changed completely: Open USD launches into a statute written for it.

The difference between the two outcomes has usually been whether the members need the thing to exist. A hundred and forty businesses that settle with each other daily have a live, recurring use for a shared token in a way Libra's marketing coalition never did. That is the strongest single argument that this one ships.

The issuer-of-record decision

One legal fact will shape everything else: somebody has to be the licensed issuer. The GENIUS Act does not license consortiums; it licenses entities, federally qualified or state chartered. Open Standard's options are the industry's whole menu. Stand up a new trust company and take it through the federal door, the slowest path and the strongest. Borrow a charter by partnering with an existing regulated issuer, the model Paxos has productised for PayPal and the Global Dollar Network, fastest to market, but it would put a supplier at the centre of a venture built to remove suppliers. Or a bank member issues, which reads naturally but hands one institution the float the collective was formed to share.

Each path allocates the economics differently, which is why the choice will take longer than the press release did. When the licence application surfaces, read the applicant's name as the answer to the only question that matters: who, in the end, holds the money.

The bank consortium next door

The same week Open USD's coverage matured, twenty-one global banks committed to their own jointly owned issuer. The two ventures are aimed at different layers, bank settlement and treasury on one side, network and merchant flows on the other, but they compete for the same scarce inputs: institutional attention, regulatory bandwidth, and the belief of corporate treasurers that any consortium token will exist in two years. They also, together, tell one story. The organised centre of the payments industry has decided stablecoin issuance is infrastructure it must own, and the era of ceding the category to two independent issuers is being ended from two directions at once.

What to watch

Four tells, in rough order of arrival. The licence: which entity applies, and whether it takes the federal or the state door, will reveal the venture's centre of gravity. The settlement wiring: the day either network accepts Open USD in its settlement pilots, the token has its first real volume. The reserve disclosure: who manages the float and how the income is shared is the document that will explain every membership decision on the list. And the Circle response: pricing moves, deeper partner revenue sharing, or a consortium of its own.

A user's guide to reading consortium news

For operators deciding what to do about Open USD today, the practical answer is: instrument, don't integrate. Nothing about the announcement requires action from a merchant, a fintech or a treasury this quarter, and consortium timelines habitually slip. What deserves instrumentation is the sequence of hard commitments: the licence application, the first named reserve manager, the first settlement volume disclosed by either network, the first member who routes real payroll or supplier flow through the token. Each of those is a fact with a date; everything before them is intent.

The other discipline is separating the two things the word stablecoin now covers. Open USD is being built as settlement infrastructure, an instrument for obligations between firms, where zero-fee mint and redeem is decisive and consumer brand is irrelevant. The consumer stablecoin fight, wallets, cards, remittances, is happening elsewhere this same week, in Samsung's wallet and Bridge's card stack. The consortium can win its layer completely without a consumer ever holding its token, and probably intends exactly that.

The stablecoin market’s first decade was a story about outsiders building money the incumbents would not touch. Its second is shaping into something more familiar: the incumbents, having lost the argument about whether, now fighting over whose. Open USD is the clearest statement yet that the payment industry's answer is: ours.