More than 150 giants have joined Open USD: Stablecoins have upgraded from a single product to an industry shared infrastructure.

Written by: Forbes

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Open USD claims to solve all the pain points of stablecoin settlements; despite having more than 150 partners at launch, can it really do it?

The guest list for Open USD is more important than the coin itself. When a dollar token launches with over 140 partners including the largest asset management firms globally, two regularly competing card networks, a global custodian bank, the largest merchant software platform, and a host of crypto companies, the coin itself becomes almost a secondary topic. Every layer of the financial system is determined to take a seat at the same table.

Founding partners include Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa, and BlackRock, who set the tone. A broader list outlines the panorama: BNY Mellon, Standard Chartered Bank, DBS Bank, and Bank of America, as well as Shopify, Google, IBM, Mercado Pago, Ripple, Aave, MetaMask, and Anchorage, with American Express and Discover also included. Reading this list by category reveals a clear map—who believes stablecoins will become important and who is reluctant to let competitors dominate this track.

This extensive alliance is no coincidence. Each category represented on the list profits from or is threatened by the flow of dollars on the blockchain in different ways. The initiators intend to gather them together because the value of stablecoins lies in how widely they are accepted, and the fastest way to establish this breadth is to make the places that accept them the owners of the coin.

Why did asset management companies join?

First, there's BlackRock. The reserves of stablecoins are its economic engine, primarily invested in short-term government bonds and money market instruments—which are precisely the assets BlackRock excels in. From an asset management perspective, a large dollar token is a massive and highly sticky cash pool that requires professional management. BlackRock has already been operating tokenized money market products adjacent to stablecoins. Joining Open USD places it within the reserve business of a coin geared toward hundreds of partners, rather than competing for management from the outside.

This management role is no small prize. Supporters envision that the scale of a dollar coin will hold hundreds of billions in government bonds and cash, generating income daily. Whoever manages it can charge fees from the largest and most stable balance in the system. BlackRock's choice to become a member rather than just a supplier indicates its expectation that Open USD will be large enough to justify earning reserve business through holding a share of the coin.

Why did merchants and banks join?

Shopify is concerned with the other end of the cash flow—checkout. Merchants incur interchange fees when customers pay by card, and the work balances they hold yield no return. A coin that can settle instantly, accept lower costs, and return balance earnings to merchants per the Open USD model solves two problems at once. For a platform with millions of merchants, a stablecoin that reduces acceptance costs and generates reserve income from idle balances directly increases profit margins.

Banks are the participants that illustrate the problem best, as they face the greatest risks. BNY Mellon, Standard Chartered Bank, DBS Bank, and Bank of America rely on holding deposits and facilitating cross-border fund transfers for profit, both of which are threatened by stablecoins. Their calculations are defensive: if tokenized dollars will siphon balances out of accounts, it is better to sit within the alliance issuing tokens, retaining custodial and settlement business, and sharing reserve income than to watch deposits flow to a coin in which they have no stake.

This hedging also comes with another layer of consideration. The largest banks in the U.S. are building a shared tokenized deposit network independently to prevent funds from leaving the banking system en masse. Their presence on the Open USD list indicates they are uncertain which model will prevail, thus betting on both paths to provide insurance.

The roles of tech and crypto camps

The names of technology companies point not only to current uses but also to future scenarios. Google and IBM are neither merchants nor banks; they are building infrastructure driven by agents—software that automatically completes purchases on behalf of users. Machine payments require programmable, clearly defined dollars, and a coin governed by an open alliance is easier to develop upon than one controlled by a single competitor. Their participation signifies a bet: a coin for machine-to-machine payment settlements should not be monopolized by any single company.

Crypto members provide things that banks and merchants cannot. Ripple brings cross-border liquidity, Aave offers a lending market, MetaMask has tens of millions of user wallets, and Anchorage meets the compliance custodial needs required for regulators to touch tokens. For Open USD, they turn a paper coin into one that can be used, traded, and settled in practical terms from day one. For crypto companies, sitting within an alliance that includes BlackRock and Visa is the mainstream path they have pursued for a decade.

Mercado Pago's inclusion points south. In Latin America, dollar stablecoins have long been the savings and settlement tool for individuals and businesses to hedge against local currency. Mercado Pago is at the center of regional demand. A member that can bring Open USD to tens of millions of Latin American users provides what its U.S. founders cannot: immediate relevance in a market where stablecoins are not a convenience but a necessity.

Competitors sitting in the same room

The strangest aspect of this list is the number of members that are competitors. Visa and Mastercard operate competing networks; American Express and Discover are two more; Coinbase and Ripple have been at opposite ends on crypto legal and cultural battlefields for years; Solana and Polygon are competitive blockchains. These companies collectively support the same coin, indicating that the fear of being excluded from stablecoin infrastructure has surpassed the instinct to build proprietary versions individually. This parallels the logic that underpinned the birth of shared card networks decades ago: no single company could create broad acceptance on its own, so they built it collectively and then competed on top of it.

The positions of the card networks are the most contradictory and also the most enlightening. Visa and Mastercard's profits come from the card swipe track, which cheap stablecoins could directly undermine, yet both are founding members. Their bet is this: since funds will inevitably shift on-chain, it's better to sell tokenization, settlement, anti-fraud, and other services on the new track than to cling to the old one, thus remaining within the flow of funds. Joining a coin that threatens them is their way of maintaining status.

This is also the alliance's weakness. A coin governed by competitors will make decision-making slow. The shared governance mechanism that makes Open USD attractive to members also complicates decision-making. Decisions on management fees, how to distribute reserve income, which chains to run on, and who bears losses—each choice can pit members against each other, while the co-founding card networks each have their own stablecoin ambitions. The alliance can only sustain itself when joining it is preferable to going solo.

What this list tells you

Setting aside individual names, the overall landscape conveys information. Asset management companies want reserves, merchants want checkout, banks want to retain deposits, crypto companies want distribution channels, card networks want to guard tolls, and big tech companies want to sit in the payment flows driven by agents on the internet. They all look at stablecoins and come to the same conclusion: this is becoming shared financial infrastructure, and the cost of being excluded is higher than the discomfort of sharing with competitors.

For Circle and Tether, this list is the real threat. They have created the best independent dollar tokens, and "independence" is exactly what Open USD members have decided they no longer want. After the announcement, Circle's stock price dropped over 17%, not because Open USD's technology is superior, but because this announcement equated to Circle needing to compete for customers that collectively aligned against them.

The absentees and those present illustrate the situation equally well. Circle and Tether are not on the list because the alliance is built to bypass them; the largest retail banks in the U.S. are also absent, as they are busy building their own tokenized deposit networks rather than supporting stablecoins. This list is a self-selected group—those who have determined that shared stablecoins are better than proprietary coins or having none at all.

This coin may take a year to officially launch, and there may be some bumps in the interesting governance mechanism. But the guest list has already provided direction: stablecoins have upgraded from a product sold by a single company to infrastructure jointly owned by the entire industry, and the businesses that recognized this earliest ensured they do not have to rent it from others.