Open USD - the Stripe stablecoin and the commoditisation of money

Much has been written about Open USD, or OUSD, the new stablecoin announced by Open Standard. Most of it seems to focus on the 140 businesses - including massive global banks and payments businesses - among them FNB, Nedbank and Absa - who have signed up as Open Standard partners. This seems to me to be missing the point. What I think is underplayed is Stripe's role and the bigger picture, and that's what I want to unpack. There are four things to think about here. First is that Stripe is building a complete stablecoin stack, second is that Circle's playbook points to where they will go next, and third that - looking at both - you can see where things might go after that. The final thing is probably the most consequential: Stripe are commoditising money, which suits their business of moving it, but may not suit everyone else.

Stripe's stablecoin stack

Stripe's mission, famously and brilliantly, is to increase the GDP of the internet. They have been serious about stablecoins for a while, recognising the strategic importance of stablecoins to payments, and have been investing accordingly. They acquired Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, and Privy, a wallet business. That gave them the ability to provide stablecoin wallets and services to clients. Then they announced Tempo, their own payments-focused blockchain. That gave them another piece of the stack, and allowed them to design a blockchain that works perfectly for payments, without competing use cases.

Now we have Open Standard. It's not branded as Stripe, and the group of partners includes several Stripe competitors. But on the basis that Stripe has said this will be the default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe, the team on LinkedIn is three Bridge people and one from Stripe, and the initial CEO is Zach Abrams (co-founder of Bridge), I am going to work on the assumption that Stripe is behind this. If you take that view, then a few other things fall into place. OUSD is the stablecoin asset that lives in customers' wallets, which work on Bridge issuance infrastructure, all of which lives on a blockchain, which will be Tempo, and Solana at launch. 

Stripe have already made it possible for their customers to use stablecoins: receive them from customers, then hold them in, and spend them from, a Stripe-provided wallet. When they do that, other stablecoin issuers benefit from the interest on the collateral assets that back the stablecoins. Now they are launching an in-house stablecoin, but they are not looking to keep the collateral interest. That part is central to the whole thing.

The stablecoin issuer business model can make money from that float interest, and from transaction fees. The fees can come from the mint & burn on issuance and redemption of coins, or potentially from the use of the stablecoins. Most stablecoin issuers make money from the float, and also from the mint & burn. Once the stablecoin is in the wild, other businesses benefit from the transaction fees. 

I described the Stripe stack above: asset (OUSD) - wallet (Privy) - issuance infrastructure (Bridge) - blockchain (Tempo). They are not the only one doing this - Paxos (USDG) run a similar model. But the thing that Stripe have is ability to make OUSD the default in their customers' wallets. Distribution wins.

As I have written before, our mental model of stablecoins tends to be skewed by the two big ones: USDT (issued by Tether) and USDC (Circle). Tether shares float interest with nobody and it is an extremely profitable business, but that benefit accrues to them mainly because they were the first mover. To achieve scale, like any business, you need distribution, and everyone after Tether has discovered that. There are two ways to do this: either you pay someone for distribution by sharing the float income, as Circle do with Coinbase; or you provide a stablecoin to an existing customer base, like PayPal with PYUSD. 

What Stripe are doing is both: if they accept that the float-dependent model is unrealistic, then you design for sharing the float income. To maximise adoption you then need as broad a set of partners as possible, and ideally all issuing the same fungible stablecoin. This is what Bridge have built their business around: they do the issuance stuff for a small fee (which is still in the OUSD model) and then their customer gets the float income. That is the starting point for OUSD and the rest of the pieces flow from that. There are six elements that they highlight on the Open Standard website, but the main one is the economic model of interest sharing, then other things are subsidiary. Neutral governance, starting with Tempo & Solana, broad adoption and so on all flow from the communal issuance model. 

Stripe's business is payments: the seven lines of code to add to your site to enable you to get paid. Stablecoins are better money, therefore enable a better payments business: programmable, fast, cheap, 24/7, and so the more Stripe can use them, the better. Bringing a large consortium of financial businesses along makes OUSD more useful, and gives those businesses an incentive to help because they benefit in a way that they do not when using USDC, and because their customers are already using Stripe. It's much easier to put my stablecoins in the bank when the bank is already part of that stablecoin business. 

Circle's playbook

The above seems obvious to me, so what comes next? Jeremy Allaire, Circle's CEO, wrote a long post which was basically about how hard it is to build a stablecoin business. He should know: Circle have gone way beyond just issuing USDC, and I think that gives some indication of where Open Standard, the business, might go. As an aside, one of his remarks was basically "good luck herding those 140 cats", which is probably the biggest challenge here. It is hard enough getting one large institution to make a decision; 140 is another level. But then look at Swift and Visa - both built as networks.

Looking at how OUSD's business model might move towards what Circle are doing is interesting. It is also instructive to see how Circle - and others like PayPal / PYUSD - have moved towards OUSD's model. In Circle's case this meant launching xReserve, which is a way to create a stablecoin that is backed by and interoperable with USDC. That is conceptually similar to OUSD, but is done on a contract by contract basis; for OUSD it is the default.

Reviewing the list of participants in Open Standard, it is notable that it is a global list, including the three South African banks listed above. When these banks deal in dollars, they currently work via nostro accounts with global US banks, and OUSD gives them an option that will provide many benefits over that model. But if we are all going to use stablecoins in the not too distant future, then we need local ones. Circle knows this, and so has issued other assets like EURC, their Euro-pegged stablecoin. But they have also partnered with non-USD or EUR stablecoins, including rand-pegged ZARU. They are building StableFX around these relationships.

The website and business behind OUSD is called Open Standard, not Open USD. Other denominations are an obvious next step, with reserves custodied by their local partners. The issuance infrastructure is there; they will need local regulation to issue local coins, either via a single entity or local subsidiaries or partners. The FX follows from there, and if the multiple coins are all on the same global infrastructure, then global payments, remittance and other FX business flows from there. FX is one way banks make money, so they will help to drive this. Expect to see Open EUR, Open JPY, even Open ZAR in due course.

Circle have issued USDC on more than 30 blockchains, which presents its own challenges. While it makes USDC available everywhere, it also creates what is technically a different asset. Circle fixes this via the Cross Chain Transfer Protocol, which enables users to bridge from one chain to another via Circle. Circle's universe already includes its own blockchain, Arc, also optimised for payments, like Tempo. Enabling interoperability of OUSD and other assets across several chains seems like another likely development.

Finally the Circle Payments Network, CPN, provides on & off ramps for Circle stablecoins around the world. This is clearly something that Open Standard will do - it is an obvious benefit of the global partner network. Partners will also integrate OUSD to their local deposit tokens or CBDC. Expect the other local stablecoins to follow regulation: as it clarifies, they will launch. There is a real opportunity here to add first mover advantage to the Open Standard business model: very few stablecoins pegged to something that isn't the dollar or the euro are at scale yet.

Then what?

The things that Circle is building are a good guide to what Open Standard might build. That leads to a competition between two business models for stablecoins. On its own, that is going to be fascinating to watch. But what comes after that? I think we need to look beyond the retail payments model that is Stripe's core business, and to some systemic features of the stablecoin world. 

Having said that, start with the customers of Stripe's customers. It suits the merchants if their customers adopt the stablecoins that they want to be paid with. The merchants want to receive stablecoins because to do so will be cheaper than other forms of payment, and also better in lots of ways. They will also be able to seamlessly accept payments from anywhere, which is additionally attractive to those who sell digital goods - they don't need to worry about shipping. And some of those digital goods will be sold to AI agents, but that's another story. Because of all these things, merchants will incentivise their customers to use stablecoins, doing another little part of Open Standard's distribution job for them.

*Quick update to the above paragraph: it was just reported (15th July 2026) that Stripe & Advent are looking to buy PayPal. That would presumably put OUSD into every PayPal user's wallet as the default stablecoin. I would say that bumps the consumer adoption a little bit!

The "multiple forms of money" challenge worries regulators. Ensuring that various privately issued forms of money trade at par with central bank money is critical to a well functioning payments system. My Absa rands interoperate with Standard Bank rands, and will need to do so with e-money and with rand stablecoins too. This is something that I am working on with PayInc, considering how to integrate tokenised money to the payments system - not just new forms of tokenised money like stablecoins, but also tokenised forms of commercial bank money too.

Wholesale payments with tokenised money are another step. The zero redemption / minting fee fits here; you can make money with a fee on payments when your goal is "cheaper than Visa"; it doesn't work for wholesale, where the goal is "zero margin lost to fees". When we start with a concept of money in our heads, that shapes how we think about new forms of money. If we think of money as cash, that's one thing; deposits are another; capital market settlement instruments are an entirely different beast. Wholesale use of OUSD et al may be an eventual outcome from Stripe's efforts, but there are a lot of moving parts here. I'm not taking a position on this yet.

Commoditising money

What Stripe may be doing here is commoditising the complement: demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease. Google gives Android away for free, and has spent a fortune developing it, because every phone running Android runs Google services by default. Commoditising the operating system grows the market for the thing Google actually monetises. 

Stripe giving away the economics of OUSD follows the same logic. The cheaper and easier it is to use stablecoins (and ease of use is part of the cost), the greater the demand should be for stablecoin related services: Stripe's payments. Money - in the form of stablecoins - is commoditised, and Stripe benefits from monetising the payments services, which are its core business.

Open USD and other Open stablecoins could make this model the dominant one for money. In a world where money is commoditised, there are a lot of second order effects. Those businesses affected could include anyone who makes money from money, like banks, so it will be interesting to see how this progresses. Good luck with the cat herding.

Photo: https://www.pexels.com/@selcuk-calisir-56680108/