Open USD Goes Live as Coinbase, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard Open Minting to Businesses

Open USD (OUSD), the stablecoin backed by a consortium including Coinbase, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard, is now live for businesses and developers, Open Standard said on September 30. The token is natively supported on Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo, and will trade on Coinbase, Kraken and Uniswap at launch, with more venues to follow.

Businesses can access OUSD through four integration paths run by Coinbase, Mastercard, Stripe and Visa, with Coinbase's path going live on October 1. Each offers APIs covering settlement, payment orchestration, trading, FX, wallets and cards, and all four support minting and redemption at a 1:1 USD rate at no cost. Open Standard is targeting banking, cross-border payments, settlement and institutional trading.

The token is issued by Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe acquired in 2024, with reserves held at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY. Monthly reserve attestations will be published on Bridge's reserves page.

The economics are the main selling point. When Open Standard introduced OUSD in June with more than 140 partners, it said partners would receive all earnings from the token's reserves, less a small management fee. That partner base now exceeds 200 financial institutions, fintechs, banks and businesses, which earn rewards in proportion to the supply and activity they drive and can also earn equity in Open Standard.

Last week the company said its five founding partners, Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa, are delivering more than $1 billion in near-term launch liquidity. It also named Zach Abrams, who founded Bridge after product roles at Square, Coinbase and Brex, as full-time CEO. The arrangement puts Stripe on several sides of the network at once, as a founding partner, an integration path and the owner of the issuer. Open Standard says it will be governed by a board representing its shareholders, eventually drawn from its founders.

The revenue-sharing model has precedent. Paxos's Global Dollar Network launched USDG in late 2024 on a similar promise to pass reserve income to distribution partners, and USDG's market cap sits at about $3.2 billion, according to CoinGecko. Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC together account for roughly $258 billion of the $291 billion stablecoin market on the same data.

The launch post gave no circulating supply figure. The more useful signal will be whether the $1 billion seed becomes organic issuance once businesses on Visa, Mastercard and Stripe's networks start minting for their own flows.