Open USD launches with Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify and Stripe as founding shareholders

Open USD went live Wednesday on Ethereum, Solana, Coinbase's Base and the Stripe-backed Tempo chain, chief executive Zach Abrams told CoinDesk. Coinbase, Mastercard, Stripe and Visa are among its backers, and the model is built to hand more of the economics and ownership to the companies that distribute and use the coin rather than the issuer itself.

The five founding partners — Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa — each hold an equal initial equity stake and have together committed more than $1 billion to establishing liquidity for the coin. Abrams said the "overwhelming majority" of Open Standard's equity will be distributed over time to partners according to how much they help the stablecoin grow, a disclosure that puts no number on that majority and no timetable against it.

Open USD enters a market worth more than $300 billion that still looks like a duopoly on supply, with Tether's USDT at about $143 billion in circulation and Circle's USDC roughly $74 billion. Banks, payment firms and fintechs have been crowding in, and the contest has been shifting from the ability to mint another digital dollar toward distribution, liquidity and the platforms where customers actually hold and use one — the ground Open Standard is claiming.

The company surfaced in June with more than 140 partners across payments, banking, crypto and technology, including BlackRock, BNY and Standard Chartered, an announcement that rattled Circle as the market weighed whether major USDC partners such as Coinbase, Visa and Mastercard were lining up behind a competing dollar. Analysts at the time questioned what those partnerships amounted to in practice and whether a structure with so many participants, some of them competitors, could make decisions at all.

Abrams' answer is that Open Standard has corporate investors but is run by its management rather than by a committee of hundreds. A smaller group of founding partners carries an ownership and governance role, while the wider network is aligned through rewards tied to how much each participant contributes to OUSD.

The arrangement reads plainly as a growth contract settled in stock: a partner that routes card settlement, cross-border payments, trading or lending through OUSD earns twice, collecting fees on the flow today and a larger claim on the issuer as supply builds. It is also a way of paying the companies being asked to push the coin in the asset itself rather than in fees, which is the difference between recruiting a distributor and buying one.

The chain list is worth reading closely: Open USD went live on Ethereum and Solana alongside Base, the chain Coinbase owns, and Tempo, which Stripe backs, putting two of the equity holders' dollar tokens directly onto rails they control or fund — the distribution argument in its most literal form.

The alignment matters for institutional take-up because equity gives Coinbase, Visa and Mastercard something a listing agreement does not: a claim on the issuer's future value that grows with the volume they route. The stakes are equal today, but the distribution schedule converts future supply into future ownership, putting each partner's own settlement business at the center of the arrangement.

Abrams' history points at the same layer of the stack: he co-founded and led Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2024, which put a public price on the rails beneath dollar tokens, and Open USD is a wager on the balance that moves across them. He has also given the product a framing in a single contrast: "Every other stablecoin is building a fund," he told CoinDesk. "We're building money." His description of success is a stablecoin that recedes into the background, until it is a core part of your mom's bank account, which suggests the benchmark he is working to is usage rather than issuance.

The Wednesday disclosure carries no supply or settled-volume figure for OUSD, and the pattern has precedent — when Mastercard's Stellar-based settlement rail reached 130 markets without a settled-value number attached, reach looked like an input and volume the output that proves the strategy. Open Standard has now made the same kind of announcement — live on four chains, capital committed, partners signed — with the same evidence still to come.

This publication has argued that the stablecoin payout layer is a licensing business, funded through unglamorous work — licences, audits and local scheme connections — while issuers have paid in stock to acquire that capability outright. Open Standard's approach to the same problem uses a different currency: it hands ownership to the firms that already hold those connections, which is cheap if the equity ends up worth something and expensive if the volume never arrives.

The consortium doubt from June — whether competitors sharing a cap table can decide anything — now rests on Abrams' account of a management-run company with a small governance group, a description of internal practice rather than a demonstration of it. What would answer it is a supply figure, and then the share of that supply the founding five are moving. Neither appears in the launch disclosure.