Open USD's 140 partners shift stablecoin competition to reserve income

More than 140 companies including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, and BNY launched Open USD on June 30, a consortium-governed stablecoin returning most reserve income to distribution partners rather than a single issuer.

"The technical layer has opened; the economic layer is only beginning to," HTX Ventures said in a report released Aug. 13 examining shifts in stablecoin revenue distribution, channel relationships, and governance.

Under Open Standard's framework, enterprises can mint and redeem OUSD free of charge and without volume limits. Open Standard charges a small management fee, with remaining reserve yields earmarked for partners who adopt and promote OUSD. HTX Ventures breaks the design into three institutional shifts: from fee-based access to subsidized distribution, from bilateral negotiations to network-wide revenue sharing, and from issuer governance to participant governance.

The stakes are substantial. Circle generated $694.1 million in total revenue in Q1, with $652.5 million — 94 percent — coming from reserve income on roughly $77 billion of USDC reserves. Coinbase received $908 million from Circle in 2024, about 54 percent of Circle's total revenue, despite directly holding only about a fifth of the USDC supply. Circle's stock fell sharply on the Open USD announcement.

Stablecoins have moved from settlement tools within crypto trading into instruments for cross-border payments, corporate treasury management, and institutional back-office clearing. Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot reached an annualized run rate of approximately $7 billion by April 2026 across nine blockchains, while Swift, the Canton Network, Fnality, and Project Agorá explore how tokenized deposits and central bank money can settle within shared environments.

Economic rights, however, remain distributed along established lines. Issuers mint stablecoins against user dollars and allocate reserves into cash and short-term Treasuries, with reserve yields accruing solely to them. Yet the system depends on exchanges and wallets for user access, payment companies to connect merchants, banks for fiat on/off-ramps, custodians for reserves, and market makers for secondary depth. These institutions bear integration, compliance, and liquidity costs, and currently capture revenue mainly through bilateral commercial agreements — where bargaining power depends heavily on their own user scale.

Execution Details Will Determine Whether the Model Holds

According to HTX Ventures, the model's viability depends on several specific mechanisms. Revenue-sharing rules directly determine who captures value: allocation by balance favors institutions with greater capital resources, while allocation by transaction volume can be distorted by internal transfers that generate activity without real payments. A workable mechanism would weigh balance retention, actual payments, new customers, and regional compliance investments together. The governance arrangement likewise rests on what the board can actually decide, not on how many institutions appear on the roster.

More fundamentally, a considerable distance separates joining a consortium from migrating core business. What ultimately determines network value is stable balances, real payment volume, market-making depth, and smooth redemptions.

The Margin War Extends Beyond Circle

If revenue-sharing models generate sustained payment volumes, the room for issuers to retain the full reserve yield spread will narrow. Exchanges, wallets, and payment companies that control access to users, liquidity, and payment use cases may shift from distribution tools to participants in revenue-sharing and governance arrangements. For banks the impact is two-sided — deposits and correspondent banking revenue may erode, but stablecoins still require reserve custody, fiat on/off-ramps, and FX liquidity. Card networks face limited direct impact, given their role in authorization, fraud management, and merchant acceptance.

Visa's follow-up move made the challenge even clearer. Its stablecoin platform, launched in beta in July 2026, gives banks, fintechs, and crypto firms infrastructure to mint, hold, redeem, and transfer stablecoins. It supports Open USD, USD Coin, and USDG. That means Visa does not need one coin to win — it can profit from the rails.

JPMorgan is approaching the same opportunity from another angle. Its tokenized deposit, JPMD, represents a bank deposit rather than a payment stablecoin. Bank deposits can pay interest directly to holders, while USD Coin cannot. For institutions, tokenized deposits may offer a familiar banking relationship with faster settlement.

Open USD raises a question that extends beyond stablecoins: when banks, payment processors, exchanges, asset managers, and custodians provide the underlying assets, customer relationships, liquidity, and compliance capabilities, how will the value chain distribute profits and control? Such shifts are most likely in middle- and back-office infrastructure, where multiple institutions are required and no single platform can independently provide customer reach, regional licensing, fiat rails, and counterparty networks. Institutions need shared infrastructure, yet remain reluctant to cede core operations, client data, and risk authority to a direct competitor. Consortium governance and revenue sharing are therefore not ideological commitments to decentralization, but pragmatic commercial prerequisites for cross-institutional networks.

HTX Ventures notes that along this trajectory, stablecoin competition will move beyond issuance scale and on-chain liquidity toward who contributes network value, who shares infrastructure revenue, who retains customers and data, and who sets operating rules. The next generation of financial infrastructure need not be fully decentralized; more likely, it evolves from single-company control toward networks where regulated participants connect, share returns, and govern major decisions through tiered arrangements.

OUSD is slated for launch later in 2026. Notably, it shares the OUSD code with Origin Protocol's Origin Dollar, launched in 2020, though the two are distinct products.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.