Why An Open Standard Will Win The Stablecoin Race
Stablecoins aren’t a profit center. So the future belongs not to a dominant issuer but to 140 rivals who agree on one neutral standard, and share the upside.
Today, more than 140 companies, most of which compete fiercely with one another, agreed to back the same stablecoin. The vehicle is Open Standard, a new and deliberately independent company launching Open USD, or OUSD, and positioning it not as anyone’s product but as neutral infrastructure for payments, trading and the internet economy. The backer list is impressive: Visa, Mastercard and American Express in the same consortium, alongside Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, BNY and a long roster of banks and fintechs that have committed to integrating OUSD at launch. And the design is the tell: OUSD charges nothing to mint or redeem at any scale, sends nearly all of the reserve income back to the companies that distribute it rather than to the issuer, and is governed collectively rather than by whoever got an early start first. It goes live across Solana, Stellar, Base, Polygon and other chains later in 2026, with Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams as interim CEO. It is the open standard that the economics of stablecoins have been pointing toward all along.
Stablecoins were never meant to be a profit center. The reason is simple: issuance does not grant any additional economics above and beyond the distribution, in terms of balances or payments volume, that you already bring to the table.
Which leads to two possible universes: one in which an endless number of stablecoins come into existence, and they all struggle for relevance, and one where companies realize this is nonsense and agree to a standard. That was the core idea behind Libra, and it now lives on with Open Standard.
Open Standard could easily succeed where Libra failed. Circle failed to capitalize on the first-mover opportunity in the regulatory-centric market, and to effectively compete with Tether for the offshore, massive market for dollarization.
That left Circle in a tough spot, one in which it has to increasingly compete with its customers with products like the Circle Payments Network, and to do what all platform architects with network effects do: tax participation at the choke point, in this case the mint and burn fees that limit interoperability and conversions back to fiat.
And of course, once you realize what was obvious to many before, you try to extend your influence over the network, hoping that it will make your product more sticky. That’s the idea behind Circle’s own network, Arc. Control the rails and the asset, and you may be able to replicate more of Libra’s playbook. Except, that’s the wrong read of Libra.
Libra was always only meant to be an enabler for wallets, merchants and platforms. It was meant to fill a void in a fragmented and historically slow infrastructure. Libra was an open protocol with open ambitions, including on the decentralization of the network. We just never got to play that level of the game because of regulatory headwinds.
But the time is perfect right now. The ecosystem realizes that a set of open standards and rules that everyone agrees to is way more powerful than a stablecoin issuer becoming too powerful against the banks, fintechs or digital platforms. Nobody wants that world.
Does this mean Open Standard will succeed? From here on, it really depends on the team’s ability to execute well on streamlined governance, independence and further ecosystem buildout through partners.
The reality is that everyone is excited at the announcement, but then the real struggle is getting people to converge on standards and rules. The Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI) exist for a reason. The GENIUS Act solved many of the critical dimensions, but many more will need to be solved.
The excitement about a more open alternative to fragmented stablecoin issuance is real. Having driven the design of an independent organization like this before, I know that from here things will be hard. And coordinating governance when parties need to collaborate first and then compete fiercely is not easy.
Dee Hock is the only one who figured this before, and maybe an agent trained on his thoughts and on how to design a chaordic alliance of frenemies may be able to help the Open Standard team scale.
The world of payments and financial services will be much better if an open standard succeeds. Today, it looks like it might be the one carrying the name.
A version of this article appeared on Forbes.