Visa and Mastercard co-own a stablecoin that hands most of its reserve income to partners

Equal stakes in Open Standard ^[2] buy a smaller share of OUSD's income than the founder title suggests. Most stablecoin issuers hold customer dollars, often in short-term government debt, and keep the interest ^[5]. Open Standard keeps only a small management fee and passes most reserve earnings to its partners ^[6]. An owner of the issuer therefore owns the small cut. Any larger payout from the reserves would reach Visa and Mastercard in their role as partners, and Crypto Briefing's account does not say how the partner share is divided.

The starting position is modest. The founders' liquidity commitment of more than $1 billion ^[3] is about a third of one percent of total stablecoin supply ^[17], which has passed $300 billion and is led by Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC ^[13]. OUSD's case is distribution: crypto users through Coinbase, merchants through Shopify, payment flows through Stripe and bank relationships through the card networks ^[15]. The partner network grew from more than 140 companies to more than 200 by launch day, with BlackRock and UBS among them ^[8]. Measured on those stated minimums, that is growth of roughly 43% ^[18].

If OUSD stays a business settlement token inside Stripe's default flow ^[9], the networks hold a slice of a reserve-income business and their card fees go untouched. If Shopify's merchants start taking it at checkout, a dollar token with no conversion fee competes with cards directly. The stake then becomes the defense in Forbes's framing, as Crypto Briefing reported it, that the card giants backed a product that could eat into their own business ^[14]. Or the networks' other bets win. Both have said they will support multiple stablecoins alongside OUSD, with broader adoption and interoperability as the stated goal ^[11], and Mastercard bought BVNK before launch ^[12].

I think the third case fits how the networks have spent. Crypto Briefing reads the mix of OUSD equity, support for rival tokens and Mastercard's acquisition as positioning to collect value whichever token wins ^[16]. The networks are not committing the card franchise to one issuer. The counter-case runs through Shopify: part-ownership of the issuer is how a network would see merchant volume leaving cards early, before the loss reaches its own results. If Shopify checkout volume begins settling in OUSD at scale, the defensive reading is right and this one is wrong.