Visa, Stripe and 140 others back new Open USD stablecoin to challenge Tether

A consortium of more than 140 financial, payments and technology companies, including Visa Inc., Stripe Inc. and BlackRock Inc., is backing a new stablecoin called Open USD, taking direct aim at the market leaders Tether and Circle Internet Group Inc.

The token, also known as OUSD, was unveiled by Open Standard LLC, an independent company that will operate it with a board drawn from its partners. Open USD will launch later this year. The group did not say which blockchain it will run on, though Tempo, the Stripe-aligned payments chain, said OUSD will be natively issued on its network from day one.

The pitch to business is built on economics. Companies can mint and redeem Open USD with no fees and no volume limits and partners keep most of the revenue earned on the reserves backing the token, minus a management fee that covers operating costs. That structure breaks from the dominant model, in which the issuer pockets the interest income on reserves.

“Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible and aligned to their interests,” Zach Abrams, founding chief executive of Open Standard, said in the announcement. Abrams co-founded the stablecoin startup Bridge Ventures Inc., which Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2025.

The lineup pulls from across finance and tech. Payment networks Mastercard Inc., American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services Inc. signed on, as did banks and asset managers BlackRock, The Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and Standard Chartered plc. On the technology side are Google LLC, Shopify Inc. and IBM Corp.

Crypto firms feature heavily too, among them Coinbase Global Inc., Ripple Labs Inc., OKX and MetaMask. Klarna Group plc, Affirm Holdings Inc., DoorDash Inc., Western Union Co. and MoneyGram International Inc. round out the early partners.

Notably absent are Tether and Circle, the two issuers who dominate the market. Tether’s USDT accounted for roughly 62% of stablecoin supply in April and Circle’s USDC about 25%, according to CoinGecko. Shares in Circle fell about 13% after the announcement.

“We welcome continued innovation and competition in the space,” Circle Chief Executive Jeremy Allaire wrote on X.

Open USD is the latest entrant in a stablecoin rush that followed the Genius Act, the regulatory framework President Donald Trump signed into law in July 2025. Klarna launched its own KlarnaUSD in November and Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. have both signaled interest in issuing tokens.

Consortium efforts are not new to the sector. Paxos launched USDG through its Global Dollar Network in late 2024 with backers including Mastercard and Robinhood, and a group of large banks led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. unveiled a shared on-chain deposit network earlier this month.

Open USD goes further on both scale and economics. Its launch list runs past 140 names, and its revenue-sharing model gives partners a financial stake in the token’s growth rather than leaving the interest income with a single issuer. Tether and Circle have spent the past decade competing against each other. They now face a coalition.

Image: Open Standard