Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
OUSD pays its partners the reserve income that stablecoin issuers usually keep
Open Standard's OUSD stablecoin launched Sept. 30 with over $1 billion from Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa. Because partners collect most of the reserve yield, the payment firms that distribute stablecoins now have a revenue reason to push this one.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Businesses that pass know-your-business checks can mint or redeem OUSD at par with no fees and no volume caps.
- Open Standard keeps a small management fee and passes the rest of the reserve yield to its partner companies.
- More than 200 companies had signed on by launch, up from more than 140 when Open Standard unveiled the project on June 30.
- The token went live natively on Ethereum, Base, Solana and Tempo, with its own version on each network and no bridged copies.
- Access runs first through Stripe, Mastercard-owned BVNK and the Visa Stablecoin Platform, with Coinbase support starting Oct. 1.
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Why it matters
- decision Merchants that settle through Stripe will get OUSD by default, so their treasury teams will have to choose actively if they want to keep settling in USDC.
- exposure Circle is not on the partner list, and it now competes for business settlement against a coin that pays its distributors out of reserve income.
- precedent Because the remaining equity goes to partners that grow OUSD supply and volume, the coin each partner routes this quarter counts toward ownership handed out in later years.
"We want to be the most useful stablecoin, the same way the U.S. dollar is useful. Every other stablecoin is building a fund. We're building money," chief executive Zach Abrams said [7]. He is contrasting OUSD with the usual stablecoin model, where the issuer collects dollars, issues tokens and keeps the income the reserves earn [16]. OUSD's reserves are held 1:1 in US dollars at institutions including BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY [5]. Bridge, which Stripe bought for $1.1 billion in 2024, issues the token and publishes monthly reserve attestations [6].
For a company that settles payments in stablecoins, a zero conversion fee saves only as much as the fee it replaces [2]. The report does not give the mint and redemption fees for USDT or USDC, the size of Open Standard's management fee, or how the remaining yield is split among partners [3].
Stripe has three roles in the arrangement. It owns the issuer [6]. It holds one of the five equal initial equity stakes [4]. And Stripe's Will Gaybrick said OUSD will become Stripe's default stablecoin for businesses [8]. Tempo, which the report describes as Stripe-aligned, reported more than $400 million in OUSD liquidity on day one [10][15]. Its chief business officer, Dan Romero, said the chain is aiming for roughly $1 billion within a few months [17]. Day one therefore brought in about 40% of that target [1].
The strongest argument that OUSD is no threat to USDC comes from OUSD's own founders. Executives from Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase have stressed that they remain committed to supporting multiple coins rather than replacing USDC [9]. Those statements are about which coins the networks will accept. The equity terms pay for something narrower: growth in OUSD supply and transaction volume [4]. I think the terms will predict what partners do better than launch-week statements will.
Circle, which issues USDC, has had a mixed run in the market so far. Its shares were hit when Open Standard first revealed the project and moved little on launch day. According to Bitcoin.com News, they are down 10% over the last five trading sessions [13].
What to watch
- Disclosure of Open Standard's management fee and the yield split among partners, the figures that decide how much of the reserve income partners actually earn.
- Whether Visa, Mastercard or Coinbase soften their multi-coin commitments once Open Standard starts allocating equity to partners that grow OUSD supply.
- A decision on the Aave Labs proposal to list OUSD as a supply-and-borrow asset on Aave V3 Core and V4 Core Hub, initially without collateral use.