Visa, Blackrock, and Coinbase Among Backers of New Stablecoin

A consortium supported by a who’s who of the payments, banking, and crypto industries has launched a new stablecoin, Open USD.

The reserve-backed stablecoin is the brainchild of Zach Abrams, founding CEO of Open Standard and co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, which was bought by payment processing firm Stripe in 2024.

“Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests,” Abrams said in a statement.

Open Standard’s founding users include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Western Union, Blackrock, Standard Chartered, Google, IBM, Coinbase, OKX, Solana, Ripple, and Aave among more than 140 companies.

Noting that stablecoins are being rapidly adopted for their speed, cost, and programmability, with transaction volumes approaching that of the ACH bank funds-transfer network, the company said “businesses still face significant hurdles: fees to mint and redeem most stablecoins are prohibitively expensive at larger volumes; companies aren’t always able to benefit from the revenues earned on the underlying reserves; and developers have little recourse if the roadmaps of third-party issuers do not meet their needs.”

Open USD is built for scale, Open Standard said, noting that businesses can mint and redeem the stablecoins with no fees for large volume transactions, unlike other stablecoin issuers like USDC’s Circle. Circle’s stock fell more than 12% on the announcement.

“We believe stablecoins can play an important role in the evolution of digital markets when supported by trusted infrastructure and practical utility,” said Samara Cohen, global head of market development at Blackrock. “Open USD is a constructive step toward giving businesses more choice in how they access tokenized value and participate in internet native digital rails.”

Unlike most stablecoin issuers, which earn interest on their backing reserve funds, Open Standard will give its partners all of the yield earned, minus a small management fee. Open Standard’s board will be made up of its partners, “ensuring decisions are made for the collective interest, not a single entity,” the company said.

“Businesses need a stablecoin designed to work at global, industrial scale,” said Will Gaybrick, president of technology and business at Stripe. “And not at the scale of the 2026 economy, but of the 2040 economy, with flurries of activity we can only begin to imagine. That’s why Open USD will be the default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe; they are the ones shaping the next 15 years of economic growth.”