Yesterday the Open Standard announced that its Open USD (OUSD) stablecoin is live, just three months after unveiling the initiative with more than 140 partners. That partner list has now grown to more than 200, with 52 banks making up almost a quarter of the total. However, the founding group of investors that will steer the firm includes just five companies so far, Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe, and Visa. Zach Abrams is stepping down from his CEO position at Stripe-owned Bridge to take on the Open Standard CEO role full time.
Four of the five partners (excluding Shopify) provide distribution at launch, and the stablecoin starts with an impressive $468 million in market capitalization. The partners will support settlement, payment orchestration, trading, FX, wallets, cards and other use cases. BlackRock, BNY and Lead Bank hold the stablecoin’s reserves, with Lead Bank previously partnering with Stripe’s Bridge for stablecoin cards.
When it was first unveiled, a distinctive aspect of Open USD was the goal of sharing all reserve earnings with partners, less a small management fee retained by the Open Standard. The current Bridge description is that “platforms using it the most receive nearly all of the underlying earnings to continue to grow.” That’s a small change, with the governance evolving more since June.
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