USDC Rival Open USD Debuts With Backing From 140 Firms

USDC News

A consortium of more than 140 payments, banking and crypto firms launched USDC rival Open USD on June 30, a dollar-pegged stablecoin built to challenge market leaders such as USDC. The token is issued by Open Standard, an independent governance entity whose founding partners include Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa and BlackRock. The official announcement framed the project as an open, low-cost and high-throughput alternative to incumbent digital dollars. By directly naming the established issuers it intends to displace, Open USD escalates competition in a sector USDC helped define, positioning network control — not token issuance — as the next battleground for institutional adoption.

Shares of Circle (CRCL), the company behind USDC, fell as much as 8% in Tuesday morning trading after the consortium unveiled its rival network. The selloff reflected investor concern that a coalition of payment giants and major banks could erode the economics underpinning Circle’s flagship token. Company disclosures show USDC reserve income — interest earned on holdings such as US Treasury bills — is central to Circle’s revenue model. A competing dollar token that redistributes that yield to partners strikes directly at that structure. The market reaction underscored how quickly sentiment can turn when entrenched fintech and banking incumbents coordinate against a single issuer.

Open USD’s design departs sharply from existing stablecoins on economics. The official announcement confirms partners can mint and redeem the token without fees, removing friction for large-scale institutional circulation. More consequentially, participating businesses retain a share of reserve earnings — the interest generated by backing assets — less a management fee, rather than ceding that yield entirely to a single issuer. Governance is shared among members instead of concentrated in one company. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins that lean on code-enforced pegs, Open USD remains fully reserve-backed. The model targets the core profitability that has made issuing dollar-pegged tokens one of crypto’s most lucrative businesses.

The new token will launch natively on Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain backed by Stripe, with deployment expected during 2026. Open Standard is led by interim chief executive Zach Abrams, co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, which Stripe acquired in 2024 in a deal valued above 1 billion dollars. Abrams previously held senior roles at Brex, Coinbase and Square. Tempo recently closed a 500 million dollar funding round led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks. Building a dedicated settlement appchain rather than deploying on existing networks — the approach behind Circle’s own Arc blockchain — gives the consortium control over throughput, fees and the rails themselves.

Notably absent from the founding lineup are the three largest stablecoin issuers: Circle (USDC), Tether (USDT) and PayPal (PYUSD). Their exclusion sets up a clear competitive divide between established issuers and the new bank-and-payments coalition. USDC and USDT together account for the overwhelming majority of stablecoin trading volume, while PYUSD remains a distant third. The consortium’s strategy appears aimed less at any single altcoin and more at the infrastructure and distribution layer the incumbents currently dominate. Whether the 140-firm group can convert institutional backing into real on-chain volume remains the decisive open question for the project.

The launch lands as stablecoins push deeper into mainstream finance, powering cross-border payments, merchant settlement and corporate treasury operations. The sector has grown beyond 300 billion dollars, with Citi projecting expansion toward 4 trillion dollars by 2030 — a forecast drawing banks and payment processors into issuing their own digital dollars. Regulation is moving in parallel: the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority published final crypto rules on the same day, lowering the capital requirement for non-systemic stablecoins to 1%. A partner-shared reserve model could align neatly with such frameworks, potentially easing the path for consortium-backed tokens across regulated markets.

COINOTAG’s proprietary 42-indicator composite S/R scoring engine returns no conventional support or resistance structure for USDC, as expected for a fully reserve-backed dollar token engineered to hold a 1.00 peg — our reading is that peg stability, not directional levels, is the metric that matters here. Against the broader tape, our aggregate market data shows the Fear & Greed Index at 15/100 (Extreme Fear), Bitcoin dominance at 69.8%, and total crypto market capitalisation near 1.68 trillion dollars — conditions in which capital typically rotates toward dollar-pegged safety. The bullish case for USDC is heightened demand for on-chain liquidity during risk-off phases; the bearish case is competitive share loss to Open USD. A sustained peg break below 0.99 would invalidate the stability thesis.