On 30 September a company called Open Standard launched OUSD, a US dollar stablecoin with five founding partners whose logos sit on most of the world's checkout screens: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and Shopify. The partners committed more than 1 billion dollars to seed liquidity and each took an equal equity stake, according to The Paypers. For a decade, stablecoins were something the payments giants watched from a distance. Now the incumbents have issued one together, and the obvious target is the market leader, Tether.
How OUSD actually works
The structure is built for businesses rather than traders. OUSD is issued by Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought for 1.1 billion dollars in 2024, and its reserves are held at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY. Businesses can mint and redeem the token one for one against the US dollar at no cost through three routes: BVNK, the stablecoin firm owned by Mastercard, Stripe itself, and the Visa Stablecoin Platform. Access through Coinbase opened on 1 October.
The token runs natively on four blockchains, Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo, and at launch it trades on Coinbase, Kraken and Uniswap. That combination matters. It means OUSD is not locked inside one company's network, and it can move between the exchanges where crypto liquidity sits and the payment platforms where merchants and businesses already operate.
Stripe has gone furthest. In its own announcement, Stripe made OUSD the default stablecoin across several products: businesses can hold it in Stripe Treasury, spend it through stablecoin cards issued via Stripe Issuing, and send it to crypto wallets in more than 100 countries. For millions of Stripe merchants, OUSD is not an experiment they have to seek out. It is the stablecoin that appears when they switch the feature on.
The free mint and redeem feature deserves attention. Many businesses that hold stablecoins today pay spreads or fees every time they move between dollars and tokens, which adds up for firms that convert often. Removing that cost at launch is a direct appeal to corporate treasurers, marketplaces and payment providers that would otherwise default to whichever token their exchange or wallet already supports.
The equity model is the real weapon
The detail most coverage underplays is the ownership structure. Tether and Circle keep the interest earned on the reserves that back their tokens, which is how they became among the most profitable companies in finance. Open Standard instead gives equity to its founding partners and has described a partner rewards model, which means the companies that distribute OUSD share in the economics of the reserves they help grow.
That flips the incentive. A payment company that routes customer balances into USDT or USDC is building someone else's business. A payment company that routes them into OUSD is building an asset it partly owns. Expect every partner to push OUSD harder than they ever pushed a third-party token, because the more of it circulates, the more they earn.
This is also why the consortium model is more threatening to Tether than any single competitor. Tether's dominance comes from liquidity and habit in crypto trading, especially across Asia and emerging markets. OUSD starts from the opposite end, with merchants, cards and corporate treasury, where Tether has little presence and the founding partners have nearly all of it.
It also changes how the token will be marketed. Tether rarely needs to sell itself to merchants, because its users are mostly traders and crypto platforms. OUSD's partners can put it in front of businesses through sales teams, developer documentation and existing contracts. That kind of distribution is slow to build and very hard for a crypto-native issuer to copy, which is why the consortium is a bigger threat to incumbents than its launch-day volumes will suggest.
- Founding partners: Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa
- Seed liquidity: more than 1 billion dollars, with equal equity stakes
- Issuer: Bridge, owned by Stripe; reserves at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY
- Chains: Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo
- Free one-to-one mint and redeem via BVNK, Stripe and the Visa Stablecoin Platform
Why the banks moved the same week
OUSD did not launch in isolation. In the same week, Citi expanded its partnership with Coinbase so corporate clients can turn incoming fiat into stablecoins automatically and accept stablecoin payments at checkout with conversion back to fiat. At Sibos in Miami, Swift said its own blockchain ledger is live for tokenised deposit payments. The direction is unmistakable: dollar tokens are moving from the crypto economy into the mainstream payments stack, and every large player is choosing whether to own a piece of it.
We noted earlier this year that bank-led stablecoin consortia were forming on a slower timeline. The card networks and Stripe have now moved first with a live product. Banks still control deposits and the regulatory relationship, but they no longer have the luxury of designing the market before anyone else enters it.
Regulation is what made the timing possible. The GENIUS Act framework in the United States set out how payment stablecoins can be issued and reserved, which gave large regulated companies the legal clarity they needed to put their names on a token. Without that, it is hard to imagine Visa and Mastercard attaching their brands to a shared issuer.
A payment company that routes balances into OUSD is building an asset it partly owns, not someone else's business.
What it means for Southeast Asia
For Asian markets the story is more complicated. USDT is the working dollar of crypto trading and informal cross-border payments across much of Southeast Asia, and it will not disappear because a consortium in the United States launched a rival. Regional regulators are also building their own frameworks. Singapore has its stablecoin rules, Hong Kong licenses issuers, and Malaysia is testing a ringgit-pegged token for fund settlement.
Where OUSD will matter first in the region is through merchants and platforms that already run on Stripe or Visa rails, and through cross-border businesses paying suppliers and freelancers. If a Singapore exporter or an Indonesian marketplace can receive OUSD and convert it at zero cost through a provider they already use, the switching cost from USDT becomes very low. That is how incumbents usually win: not by being better money, but by being money that is already plugged in.
Regulators in the region will also watch closely. A dollar token pushed hard by global card networks could speed up dollarisation of digital payments in countries that are trying to strengthen their own currencies. Expect central banks in markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand to keep encouraging local currency settlement and domestic real-time payment systems, even as merchants experiment with OUSD for cross-border sales.
What brokers and payment firms should do now
For forex and crypto brokers, the immediate question is funding. Many brokers already accept USDT and USDC deposits. Adding OUSD costs little and signals that a firm is aligned with regulated, mainstream rails, which matters to clients and to banking partners. For payment service providers, the bigger question is whether to integrate OUSD directly or wait for clients to ask. Given who is behind it, waiting is the riskier choice.
There is a reputational angle as well. Banks that provide accounts to brokers and payment firms remain cautious about crypto exposure. Being able to say that client funding runs on a token issued by a Stripe-owned company, with reserves at BlackRock and BNY and backing from Visa and Mastercard, is a much easier conversation with a compliance officer than explaining exposure to an offshore issuer. For firms that have struggled to keep banking relationships, that alone may justify adding OUSD early. Early movers also get to shape how the token is used in their market, which is worth more than any launch incentive.
What is OUSD?
OUSD is a US dollar stablecoin launched on 30 September 2026 by Open Standard, whose founding partners are Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa.
Who issues OUSD and holds the reserves?
It is issued by Bridge, owned by Stripe, and its reserves are held at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY.
Which blockchains support OUSD?
OUSD runs natively on Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo, and at launch it traded on Coinbase, Kraken and Uniswap.
Why is OUSD a challenge to Tether?
Its founding partners already control much of global card, merchant and online payment distribution, and they share equity in the issuer, giving them a direct incentive to push OUSD over third-party stablecoins.
Every earlier stablecoin had to persuade the payments industry to use it. OUSD is the payments industry. That does not guarantee it beats Tether in crypto markets, where habit and liquidity are hard to dislodge, but it almost certainly makes it the default dollar token for mainstream commerce within a year or two. The firms that will benefit are the ones that integrate it while it is still news, not after their clients start asking why they have not.
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