Open Standard's OUSD Stablecoin Goes Live With $1 Billion Liquidity Pledge

OUSD Goes Live on Four Chains

Open Standard launched its dollar-pegged stablecoin Open USD (OUSD) on September 30, handing companies and developers a shared settlement asset built by five of the largest names in global payments. The company's launch announcement confirms that OUSD can be minted and redeemed 1:1 for US dollars free of charge, and that the token runs natively on four blockchains: Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo. Issuance is handled by Bridge, the stablecoin platform owned by Stripe, while Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and Shopify signed on as founding partners and investors. Since Open Standard first unveiled the project in June, its network has grown from more than 140 partners to over 200 financial institutions, fintechs, banks and global companies, with SBI Holdings, UBS and the fintech firm Jeeves among the latest additions. Businesses can already integrate OUSD through the stablecoin platforms of Mastercard, Stripe and Visa for payments, card settlement and cross-border transfers, and the Coinbase integration opened on October 1. Developers get four integration paths whose APIs and tooling cover settlement, payment orchestration, trading, foreign exchange, wallets and cards. Trading access is planned first on Coinbase, Kraken and Uniswap, whose automated market maker pools tend to handle dollar-pegged assets with tight spreads, and Open Standard says more venues will follow. The company positions OUSD as a neutral layer that many firms can build on rather than a proprietary asset tied to one brand. That framing puts it directly against issuer-branded tokens from Circle and Tether, whose USDC and USDT dominate stablecoin settlement volumes today. Open Standard has not published an initial circulating-supply figure for OUSD, and no trading volumes exist yet, so adoption has to be read from issuance data as it accumulates.

The $1 Billion Liquidity Pledge

The five founding partners have committed more than $1 billion to seed OUSD liquidity over the coming months, and each holds an equal initial equity stake in Open Standard; the individual amounts and shareholdings remain undisclosed. Reserves behind the token sit with BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY Mellon as custodians, and the company will publish monthly proof-of-reserves reports, a cadence intended to keep backing verifiable from day one. The economic design is where OUSD diverges most sharply from standard issuer models. CEO Zach Abrams said the company places a “stablecoin economy distribution” mechanism at the core of the project: founding partners get no privileged revenue splits and earn rewards under the same rules as every other participant, in proportion to the OUSD supply and transaction activity they generate. According to Zombit, Open Standard intends to distribute the vast majority of its equity to founding and network partners over the next four to five years, with participants above a minimum threshold earning stakes tied to the OUSD supply and activity they drive; the threshold itself has not been announced. Abrams argues the opportunity extends beyond taking share from USDT or USDC, pointing to card settlement, foreign exchange and cross-border payments, where money could move faster and at higher frequency over a stablecoin rail. Governance stays centralized for now: Open Standard is not a consortium in which hundreds of partners vote on operations, with management running the business day to day while the smaller founding group controls ownership. The company expects to grow the founding cohort to roughly 10 to 12 members and to form a board drawn from that group.

A Run at USDT and USDC

COINOTAG's read: the launch matters less for day-one reach than for its incentive structure. The company's own announcement is explicit on what is confirmed: a free 1:1 mint and redeem, four chains, named reserve custodians and monthly attestations. It is equally clear on what is not: per-partner investment sizes, the equity threshold and the initial OUSD supply. Whether the contribution-based equity model can lift OUSD's supply and transaction counts fast enough to challenge USDT and USDC is the metric to watch through the fourth quarter, and the $1 billion commitment gives it a running start.