World tech giants to take stablecoin market and reserve profits from USDT and USDC
Yesterday, the world's biggest tech giants announced the launch of a new consortium entering the stablecoin market with their own product. The consortium comprises more than 140 companies — Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, Google, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Shopify, Standard Chartered, American Express, and dozens of others — all suddenly launching their own stablecoin, Open USD (OUSD).
The market reaction was swift: Circle's shares dropped 17% that same day, hitting a four-month low. Businesses and everyday users are divided: some prefer sticking with familiar tools, while others are open to the idea of benefiting from the new token's zero fees — especially given the caliber of companies behind it.
But why do they need their own token, and why now?
Monoup team uncovers the story.
What is Open Standard and OUSD
Whether stablecoins are necessary today is no longer a question — even the most conservative companies have already integrated them into their operations. For a long time, USDC and USDT were good enough for everyone: they were accessible, dominant by volume, and remain the go-to for everyday users and merchants. But for the largest corporations, working with established stablecoins stops making economic sense once the volumes being moved become very large.
This has been discussed in the press more than once, yet end users paid little attention to the fact that Tether earned $10 billion in net profit from its reserves in 2025 — comparable to Bank of America. And to generate that profit, the company simply needs to issue right volume of tokens, maintain their circulation, and invest the available reserves into securities and other instruments. Tether's core income is the interest on those investments — which it keeps entirely for itself as the issuer of USDT.
Meanwhile, payment networks and other companies that joined the consortium directly drive transaction volume by routing everything through themselves. Visa processes USDC transactions, Stripe integrates stablecoins into its products, Shopify enables merchants to accept payments. All of them are active participants in the flow — but none of them earn a cent from the reserve income. They operate on Tether's and Circle's infrastructure, generate volume, collect their own fees, but get nothing from the infrastructure itself.
Open Standard was created to change exactly that. It operates as the issuer of OUSD on the Solana blockchain. According to the project's website, governance of the new token is handled by a board of directors composed of partner company representatives not a single issuer. This is what they call the “cooperative model,” as opposed to how Tether and Circle are structured.
Under OUSD's model, reserve income from investments is distributed among all partners in proportion to the volume they generate. Token issuance and redemption are free and uncapped, with Open Standard retaining only a small management fee.
Profit margin or genuine innovation?
Looking at the new token from a market development perspective, everyday stablecoin holders shouldn't expect much to change. OUSD is still a dollar-pegged token at 1:1. The difference lies in who the issuer is and how the economics work internally. For businesses, zero minting and redemption fees are genuinely interesting as they potentially reduce operating costs.
At the same time, these companies aren't planning to offer a choice, instead they roll out their stablecoin as the default. Stripe has already announced that OUSD will become its primary stablecoin, which effectively displaces transactions in other tokens. It's reasonable to expect Google, Visa, and Mastercard to follow suit.
This opens up a different view on the situation, where it looks less like innovation and more like a corporate redistribution of reserve income, packaged in a narrative about openness and decentralization. Companies that spent years building stablecoin distribution networks and working on top of Tether's and Circle's infrastructure have now decided to build their own and monetize the same flow themselves.
Tether is likely under less pressure than Circle, since its dominance is concentrated in emerging markets where Open Standard has no comparable foothold yet. Circle, by contrast, built its business around partnerships with institutional players in Western markets — and now finds itself in a significantly more vulnerable position. To make things worse, BlackRock and BNY, which manage Circle's own reserves, have joined the competing structure.
OUSD is targeting a late 2026 launch — at which point it will become clear how quickly volume redistributes, and whether the market ends up with three equally dominant stablecoins or the new instrument absorbs the bulk of institutional flows.
