Circle has had better days. Shares of Circle Internet Group fell more than 16% after a new consortium called Open Standard announced Open USD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by over 140 partners including Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, and BlackRock. The market read the room quickly: this is not a scrappy startup threatening USDC. It is a coalition of the industry’s biggest names.
The announcement came on June 30, 2026, with the actual launch of Open USD, or OUSD, expected later in the year.
What Open Standard is actually building
The core pitch behind OUSD is straightforward: zero fees for minting and redeeming, no artificial caps on transaction volume, and a revenue-sharing model that sends nearly all earnings from U.S. Treasury reserves back to partner firms after a nominal management fee.
Compare that to how Circle operates today. USDC generates revenue largely by keeping the yield on the reserves backing it. OUSD flips that logic by distributing most of those earnings to the network of partners who drive adoption and volume.
