ARK Invest executive questions stablecoin alliance project OpenUSD: may repeat the "Diem-style collaborative failure"

Odaily Planet Daily News ARK Invest Director of Digital Asset Research Lorenzo Valente published an article questioning the stablecoin alliance project OpenUSD, expressing high skepticism about whether such consortium-style stablecoin plans can scale. He believes that such alliances have emerged multiple times before, including Diem, Global Dollar, etc., but ultimately failed to form dominant network effects. Currently, the stablecoin market is still dominated by Tether and Circle, whose core advantages lie in strong network effects and instant liquidity. OpenUSD may face a "cold start" problem, as the joint governance structure will severely slow down decision-making efficiency. Under decentralized governance, it is prone to coordination failures, similar to the governance dilemmas of DAO experiments: high collaboration costs, slow execution, and difficulty in deploying capital efficiently.

Furthermore, OpenUSD's economic model seems difficult to sustain long-term operations. If it relies on a low-fee sharing mechanism, it will not be able to cover infrastructure, incentives, and market expansion costs.

Lorenzo Valente concluded that OpenUSD is more like a "collection of letters of intent" rather than a unified product system with strong execution capability. He believes that a single operating entity capable of rapid iteration and independent decision-making is more likely to succeed in the long term than a joint governance structure requiring multi-party consensus.