USDC Issuer Circle Falls 17.5% After Rival Open USD Launch

USDC News

The company behind USDC, Circle Internet Group, watched its shares plunge 17.5% on Tuesday after a consortium of more than 140 firms unveiled Open USD, a competing revenue-sharing stablecoin. The stock closed at $62.65, down from a $72.25 open, after touching an intraday low of $62.52. Trading volume swelled to over 34.5 million shares, more than double the roughly 14 million daily average, as investors digested the threat to Circle’s stablecoin infrastructure. Open USD, abbreviated OUSD, is backed by BlackRock, Google, Visa, and Coinbase — the latter a longstanding Circle ally. The launch reframes competition for USD Coin (USDC), the second-largest dollar-pegged token.

A separate enterprise survey underscored why incumbents are fighting for position. Polling 468 executives across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, payments-infrastructure firm Cybrid found that 42% of businesses already use stablecoins for cross-border settlement, while only 2% still rely solely on legacy rails such as SWIFT. Companies report average savings of 35% on payment costs, rising to 47% for multinationals settling more than $100 million monthly. Some 88% of executives said they expect to adopt stablecoin payments within twelve months. Payroll and contractor disbursements ranked as the most common use case, ahead of supplier and customer settlement.

Open USD’s design directly targets the economics that have enriched stablecoin issuers. Built by Open Standard, an independent operator led by founding chief executive Zach Abrams — who previously founded the Stripe-acquired firm Bridge — the token offers fee-free, uncapped minting and redemption. Crucially, most reserve income flows to partner businesses rather than a single issuer, minus a modest management fee, while governance sits with a board drawn from member companies. The backer roster spans Visa, Mastercard, American Express, BNY, Standard Chartered, Google, Shopify, Coinbase, and Ripple. BlackRock’s Samara Cohen described the effort as a constructive step toward giving businesses more choice in digital payments.

Circle moved quickly to contain the damage. Chief executive Jeremy Allaire insisted USDC would keep expanding despite intensifying rivalry, framing the token as the preferred choice for institutional users. The reassurance did little to stem the slide: the one-day drop extended Circle’s monthly decline to roughly 39%, a steep reversal for a company that became a closely watched proxy for stablecoin adoption after its public listing. The episode highlights how dependent Circle’s valuation has become on USDC’s fee economics — the very model Open USD is engineered to undercut by redistributing reserve yield to the ecosystem rather than the issuer.

The competitive reshuffle plays out against a rapidly expanding market. Total stablecoin capitalization has reached roughly $307.6 billion, led by Tether’s USDT at about $184.7 billion, with USDC second at $73.5 billion. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins, both are fully reserve-backed. Since the GENIUS Act established the first US federal framework for payment stablecoins, the value of tokens meeting its compliance standards has surged past $76 billion, easing regulatory hesitancy among mainstream corporates. Yet 71% of surveyed executives still cite regulatory clarity as the single largest barrier to wider adoption — ranking it above ERP integration or finding trusted infrastructure providers.

Wall Street’s growing embrace is accelerating the shift toward on-chain settlement and stablecoin-native rails like Circle’s Arc blockchain. Custody giant BNY has expanded its digital-asset platform to support USDC storage, transfer, minting, and redemption, while Falcon Finance partnered with Anchorage Digital to launch a dollar stablecoin, fUSD. Independent data reinforces the momentum: McKinsey estimates business-to-business transactions accounted for 60% of an estimated $390 billion in stablecoin payment volume during 2025. Payments processor Paybis reported that enterprise clients made up nearly 98% of its stablecoin flow in early 2026, up sharply from just 36% in 2023 — evidence that corporate treasuries, not retail speculators, now drive settlement.

From our desk, the relevant signal for USDC is peg integrity rather than directional price. COINOTAG’s proprietary 42-indicator composite scoring engine treats the token differently from a volatile asset: with no support or resistance band to map, its peg-integrity module instead scores deviation from the $1.00 reference, and our reading shows USDC holding par through the equity-side selloff — a sign the Circle stock rout has not spilled into on-chain redemption stress. Broader sentiment is fragile: COINOTAG’s aggregate market data puts the Fear & Greed Index at 15/100 (Extreme Fear), Bitcoin dominance at 69.8%, and total crypto capitalization near $1.68 trillion, conditions that often deepen a bear market. The bullish case rests on USDC’s $73.5 billion float and GENIUS Act compliance; the bearish risk is structural, as Open USD’s yield-sharing model compresses issuer margins. A sustained peg break below $0.99 would invalidate the stability thesis.