Circle shares fell as much as 8% after Open Standard unveiled a rival stablecoin backed by more than 140 companies. Open USD plans to offer fee-free minting and redemption while sharing reserve income with participating businesses.
Circle shares fell as much as 8% after Open Standard unveiled a rival stablecoin backed by more than 140 companies. Open USD plans to offer fee-free minting and redemption while sharing reserve income with participating businesses.
Open Standard is an independent company led by Zach Abrams, co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure provider Bridge, which Stripe acquired in 2024. More than 140 businesses support the initiative, including BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, U.S. Bank, Shopify, Google, IBM, MetaMask, Aave, Solana, Polygon and Ripple.
Circle shares fell as much as 8% in Tuesday morning trading after Open Standard launched Open USD, a stablecoin designed to compete with established products including Circle’s USDC. Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa and BlackRock are among the initiative’s founding partners.
The model could intensify competition over the economics and infrastructure behind stablecoins. Open USD plans to let businesses mint and redeem tokens without fees and receive reserve income after a management fee, rather than leaving most of that revenue with a central issuer.
Open Standard is an independent company led by Zach Abrams, co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure provider Bridge, which Stripe acquired in 2024. More than 140 businesses support the initiative, including BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, U.S. Bank, Shopify, Google, IBM, MetaMask, Aave, Solana, Polygon and Ripple.
Open USD will also use shared governance among members. Its structure resembles Paxos-led Global Dollar Network, which distributes reserve income to participating companies and counts Robinhood, Kraken and Galaxy Digital among its backers.
The launch challenges a central part of Circle’s business model: earning interest by investing the reserves supporting USDC in short-term U.S. Treasuries. USDC has about $73 billion in circulation, compared with roughly $145 billion for market leader Tether’s USDT, as competition expands from token issuance into payments, distribution and network control.
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