A consortium of financial giants are taking aim at the top two stablecoin issuers. On Tuesday, Open Standard, a company that says it’s partnered with Stripe, Visa, BlackRock and over 140 other businesses, announced that it will launch a new stablecoin called Open USD, or OUSD. The two largest stablecoin issuers, Tether and Circle, are notably not part of the new consortium.
OUSD will launch later this year and is structured to return most reserve revenue, or interest earned on the assets backing it, minus a small management fee, to participants. Open Standard did not disclose on which blockchain the stablecoin will operate.
“It’s a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it,” Zach Abrams, interim CEO of Open Standard, said in a statement. Abrams is also the cofounder of the stablecoin startup Bridge, which Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2025.
The new initiative appears to be a serious challenge to Tether and Circle, which have long dominated the market for stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar. In April, Tether’s stablecoin, USDT, accounted for about 62% of the stablecoin market, while Circle’s USDC held roughly 25%, according to a report from the crypto analytics company CoinGecko.
