让Circle单日暴跌17%的新玩家OUSD是什么？140家巨头入局的新型稳定币模式
1. Introduction: Open USD
On June 30, 2026, Open Standard announced the launch of a new stablecoin pegged to the US dollar (Open USD, OUSD).
On the day of the announcement, the stock price of USDC issuer Circle (NYSE: CRCL) experienced a decline of approximately 15% to 18%. Despite having a zero circulating supply and not yet being officially launched, the release of OUSD captured market attention.
Behind OUSD is a cooperative network comprising over 140 institutions, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and Google. The project does not position itself as a single company's proprietary product. Instead, it attempts to adjust the business logic of existing stablecoins, pushing their evolution towards public financial infrastructure. Much like traditional bank clearing systems or credit card networks, it aims to be a foundational network maintained by multiple institutions, upon which everyone can build services, rather than being privately controlled by a single company.
2. OUSD's Design and Revenue Distribution
The current global stablecoin market has a total market capitalization exceeding $300 billion. The market is predominantly dominated by Tether (USDT, market cap around $184-186 billion) and Circle (USDC, market cap around $73-74 billion), which together hold approximately 86% market share.
The prevailing business model involves issuers taking user funds and investing them in underlying assets like short-term US Treasury bonds. The interest from reserve holdings constitutes the issuer's primary revenue stream. This means the issuer earns profits by taking the money users provide in exchange for stablecoins and buying government bonds or depositing it in banks. For instance, in the first quarter of 2026, approximately 94% to 96% of Circle's total revenue came from reserve interest.
Addressing this structure, Open Standard designed three core mechanisms for OUSD:
1. Cost-Free Minting and Redemption. Minting refers to enterprises or users exchanging fiat currency with the issuer for an equivalent amount of stablecoins; redemption is the reverse process of exchanging stablecoins back to fiat currency, representing the essential pathway for funds entering and exiting the blockchain ecosystem. OUSD promises enterprise-level members conversion channels with no transaction volume limits and zero fees, aiming to reduce friction costs for large-scale commercial settlements.
2. Reserve Revenue Sharing. All revenue generated from OUSD's underlying assets, after deducting a small management fee for maintaining technical and compliance operations, will be proportionally distributed to ecosystem partners. This alters the model where the issuer exclusively captures interest, allowing participants providing payment channels, merchant networks, and liquidity to receive tangible economic rewards.
3. Coalition Governance. A board comprising representatives from multiple enterprises will jointly vote on rules, fee adjustments, and future development, preventing any single company from unilaterally controlling the system. OUSD abandons the single-company control structure; its major decisions will be collectively made by a board of cooperating institutions.
This model challenges the existing profit distribution structure. Take Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, as an example. It currently holds approximately 25% of the circulating USDC and receives corresponding reserve interest shares from Circle under their existing agreement. The revenue-sharing agreement between Coinbase and Circle is up for renewal negotiations in August 2026. Interestingly, Coinbase appears as a founding member among the 140 institutions in OUSD's partnership list. Objectively, this adds bargaining chips ahead of the renewal negotiations and puts pressure on the market to reassess the old "issuer-dominant revenue" model.
3. The Network Effect of Stablecoins
The launch of OUSD represents a strategic restructuring in the digital payments space by traditional payment institutions and technology companies.
1. Stripe's Strategic Extension and Agentic Commerce
One of the core driving forces behind OUSD is the payment service provider Stripe. Zach Abrams, the current CEO of Open Standard, was previously a co-founder of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company acquired by Stripe. Stripe's active involvement in building OUSD signals its goal shifting from being a mere payment interface provider to a foundational fund flow network. This is particularly driven by the upcoming era of Agentic Commerce. Agentic commerce refers to an economic model where AI programs replace humans in automatically completing cross-platform price comparisons, purchases, subscriptions, and settlements. In agentic commerce, transactions between machines require extremely high frequency and minimal friction costs, and the open standard championed by OUSD is designed to meet these automated settlement needs.
2. Card Networks
In the existing stablecoin ecosystem, traditional card networks like Visa and Mastercard primarily act as fiat on/off-ramps. These ramps are bridge services facilitating the exchange between real-world fiat currencies (like USD, EUR) and cryptocurrencies on the blockchain. Under this old model, card networks could only earn thin transaction processing fees. By joining the OUSD network as founding members, these card networks directly participate in the governance and economic distribution of the stablecoin ecosystem, significantly enhancing their strategic position in the digital payments era.
3. Coinbase's Role
The actions of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase are noteworthy in this changing landscape. Coinbase has been a long-term, deep partner of USDC issuer Circle, with a critical profit-sharing agreement between them that is up for renewal in August 2026. However, Coinbase has prominently chosen to join the OUSD alliance. This move reflects a hedging strategy: on one hand, ensuring it is not sidelined in a diversified stablecoin market; on the other hand, by supporting a new competitive standard, it increases its own bargaining power in the upcoming renewal negotiations.
Overall, the competitive dimension in the stablecoin industry is shifting. Market focus has moved from simply "which company's token has a larger market cap" to "who can control the widely accepted payment standard and distribution network."
4. Legal and Regulatory Dimensions: Compliance Exploration Under a New Framework
The innovation in OUSD's mechanisms is closely tied to the latest changes in the US and global regulatory environment, representing a concrete effort to seek commercial space within legal frameworks.
1. Leveraging the GENIUS Act
The launch of OUSD coincided with the implementation of US regulatory policy. In July 2025, the US officially passed the GENIUS Act, a federal law specifically designed to regulate stablecoins. It mandates that stablecoins must have one-to-one reserve backing with low-risk assets like US dollars and stipulates strict audit and disclosure standards. The passage of this act removed legal uncertainties for large financial institutions to participate in and jointly issue stablecoins, providing a clear basis for compliance.
2. Exploring Revenue Distribution
The GENIUS Act includes an important provision: it prohibits issuers from paying yields to token holders. This regulation acts as a ban on paying interest to end-users. The rationale is that regulators, to prevent stablecoins from being legally classified as "securities," explicitly prohibit directly distributing the interest generated from reserves to ordinary individual holders.
To achieve shared benefits while complying with this ban, OUSD adopts a differentiated distribution strategy: it does not distribute interest to individual end-holders. Instead, after deducting management fees, it proportionally distributes the reserve revenue to the distribution network and infrastructure participants (such as payment companies, merchant platforms) that facilitate its circulation.
3. Regulatory Challenges in Europe and Global Markets
Despite finding a compliance path in the US market, OUSD's alliance model faces complex legal challenges globally. Take Europe's MiCAR (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) as an example. The MiCAR framework tends to require stablecoins to have a clear, single authorized issuing entity. OUSD, being a loose alliance of over 140 institutions, presents a systemic conflict regarding who acts as the single entity to apply for licenses and who bears unified responsibility for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance in practice. Balancing decentralized alliance governance with regulators' demands for clear entity responsibility is a challenge OUSD must solve for its global expansion.
5. Industry Evaluation and Potential Challenges: Can OUSD Break Through?
Despite its innovative business model and initial support from numerous large institutions, Open USD (OUSD) faces significant challenges in practical implementation stemming from the existing industry landscape and the alliance's own structure.
1. The New Distribution Model Yet to be Proven
OUSD's launch elicited different reactions from executives of existing stablecoin giants. Jeremy Allaire, CEO of USDC issuer Circle, expressed clear skepticism. He pointed out that the stablecoin market exhibits a strong winner-takes-all effect, where dominant players capture almost the entire market share, making it difficult for weaker players to survive. Allaire argued that distributing all reserve revenue outwards is akin to "starving the infrastructure," depriving the system of sufficient funds for continuous investment in compliance, security, and technological development. He also emphasized that alliance models historically suffer from slow decision-making and misaligned internal incentives.
In contrast, Paolo Ardoino, CEO of USDT issuer Tether, responded with a relatively relaxed tone, publicly stating, "Welcome OUSD. Player 2 has joined the game." Zach Abrams, CEO of OUSD operator Open Standard, reiterated its positioning, emphasizing it as a stablecoin designed specifically for the internet economy and co-created by the enterprises driving its development.
2. The Fake Partnership Controversy
Shortly after the project announcement, OUSD faced a severe credibility crisis. According to media reports, several Korean companies listed among the initial 140 partners (such as Samsung Electronics, Dunamu, K Bank) came forward to clarify that they had not signed any formal partnership agreement with Open Standard. They stated they were only in a preliminary understanding phase and were surprised to be included in the list. In the US, advisors to relevant institutions also indicated that some companies claimed never to have agreed to anything.
3. Historical Lessons
The biggest challenge OUSD faces is the deep liquidity moat and extensive trading pairs of existing giants. The more trading pairs a stablecoin has (e.g., for directly buying Bitcoin), the more useful it is considered. A newly issued OUSD will need significant time to convince the market to establish equivalent capital depth. Furthermore, history offers a cautionary tale. In 2019, the Libra (later renamed Diem) project, spearheaded by Facebook and featuring a similar high-profile coalition including Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe, ultimately disbanded under regulatory pressure and internal interest conflicts. OUSD must prove that its 140 competing institutions can maintain alignment in governance, standards, and rule enforcement to avoid repeating this history.
6. Conclusion: A Shift in Value Distribution
In summary, the emergence of Open USD may not immediately replace USDC or dethrone USDT's dominant circulating supply in the short term. However, its impact on the stablecoin industry is profound and irreversible. It represents a foundational system connecting banks, payment companies, merchants, and users, designed to efficiently and cost-effectively handle global fund transfers. The core significance of OUSD lies in its open challenge to the existing profit distribution rules, shifting the focus from the monopolistic model of a single issuer to the shared interests of the entire ecosystem.
Whether OUSD ultimately succeeds in establishing a global payment standard or becomes bogged down by internal alliance coordination issues, it has irrevocably posed a core question to the entire industry: If stablecoins are to become the infrastructure for future global commerce, shouldn't the enterprises providing the use cases, distribution channels, and users be entitled to participate in the system's revenue distribution and governance? With Wall Street financial institutions and global payment giants entering the arena directly, the competitive logic of the stablecoin track has changed. It's moving from "whose token is more compliant" to "whose platform can distribute value more fairly."
This article is intended solely for legal, policy, and industry research exchange, aiming for objective analysis of digital finance, stablecoins, digital assets, and related regulatory developments. It does not constitute investment advice, legal advice, tax advice, or any other professional advice, nor does it constitute a recommendation, endorsement, or solicitation for any financial product, digital asset, or commercial project. The regulatory rules, market data, and institutional information referenced herein are primarily derived from public sources and may change due to evolving laws, regulations, policies, market conditions, and project developments. Readers are advised to make independent judgments based on the latest publicly available information and to comply with applicable laws and regulations in their respective countries or regions. The author and publishing platform assume no responsibility for any investment, trading, or other business decisions made in reliance on the content of this article.
