The first stablecoin race was straightforward. Accumulate supply.
Customers exchanged dollars for tokens, the issuer invested the corresponding reserves primarily in highly liquid assets, and the interest generated on those reserves became revenue. Scale the circulating supply into the tens of billions of dollars, and stablecoin issuance began to resemble an extraordinarily efficient financial business.
But on Wednesday (Sep. 30), a 140-member strong consortium, Open Standard, backed by firms across payments, crypto and commerce like Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and Shopify, launched a new stablecoin that could spell the end of the economics supporting crypto’s initiation stablecoin issuance model.
The stablecoin token, called Open USD, or OUSD, arrives in a crowded market for dollar-pegged tokens. But the asset’s more consequential feature is buried beneath the familiar stablecoin plumbing. Instead of concentrating most of the income generated by reserves with the issuer, Open Standard is designed to return reserve earnings, minus a management fee, to participating businesses.
The companies that bring OUSD into wallets, merchant checkout, corporate treasury, cross-border payments and other financial workflows can participate in the economics generated by the dollars sitting behind it. Businesses can also mint and redeem OUSD at par without fees or artificial volume limits.
In other words, OUSD is asking a question that becomes increasingly uncomfortable as stablecoins enter mainstream payments: If platforms, banks and payment companies provide the customers and transaction volume, why should the stablecoin issuer capture most of the yield?
Read more: Open USD’s Biggest Challenge Isn’t Circle or Tether, It’s History
Stablecoins Are Starting to Look Less Like Products Than Infrastructure
Instead of maximizing the economics retained by a central issuer, Open USD’s structure gives distributors a reason to push the currency themselves. That changes the incentive from “please integrate our stablecoin” to “participate in the economics when your customers use it.”
PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote earlier this year about how the fight underneath is OUSD’s make-or-break. Does real-time money run over public rails, operated by new issuers who sit outside the banking system? Or over private rails run by banks and networks, modernized but still inside the regulated system? Stablecoins push the first answer. Tokenized deposits and the SWIFT ledger push the second. The GENIUS Act gave the first real legs and drew in names like BlackRock. But legitimacy isn’t direction. The industry hasn’t decided. OUSD is a bet on the public-rail answer, that report noted.
Infrastructure providers can today handle stablecoin custody, reserves, compliance, minting and redemption behind the scenes. What remains difficult is distribution: getting a digital dollar embedded deeply enough into existing financial behavior that businesses actually use it.
“We think of stablecoins as rails,” Mastercard Executive Vice President of Blockchain and Digital Assets Raj Dhamodharan told PYMNTS in an earlier interview. “Each stablecoin can be thought of as a global ACH (automated clearing house), where the consumer doesn’t see the complexity.”
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
“The technology underneath this is quite powerful,” Dhamodharan said. “But that alone is not sufficient. To unlock the full value, really that orchestration needs to be provided.”
Read more: Open USD Just Turned the Stablecoin Race Into an Ecosystem Contest
The Real Stablecoin Competition Is for Distribution
The traditional stablecoin model benefited from a useful asymmetry: other companies provided much of the distribution while the issuer captured much of the reserve income. That arrangement becomes harder to defend when distributors can participate directly in the economics.
That does not mean OUSD will displace established stablecoins. Liquidity creates formidable network effects, and USDT and USDC already sit inside exchanges, wallets, trading pairs and blockchain applications across the world. Financial infrastructure rarely changes simply because a new entrant offers better economics.
But OUSD does not necessarily need to win existing crypto liquidity. Its opportunity is the next pool of stablecoin volume: transactions that haven’t moved on-chain yet.
“The Wallet Effect: How Credit Unions Can Close the Digital Currency Access Gap,” a June 2026 Credit Union Tracker from PYMNTS Intelligence and Velera, found rising interest in digital currency among younger consumers, and a limited grasp on how various digital assets work.
See also: Open USD and the Questions 140 Logos Don’t Answer
The industry’s early winners were recognizable currencies with enormous circulating supplies. Its next winners could look more like infrastructure protocols: widely used, economically important and largely invisible to the end user.
Competition around that future is already shaping up, and fast. On Sept. 22, SoFi announced that it would use its SoFiUSD stablecoin to settle card transactions on Mastercard’s network, with the initiative expected to support more than $25 billion in annual transaction volume. The development illustrates how banks and payment networks are beginning to incorporate stablecoins into existing financial services rather than treat them exclusively as cryptocurrency products.
For all PYMNTS digital transformation and B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily digital transformation and B2B newsletters.
Add as Preferred Source
