Visa, Mastercard and Stripe launch their own digital dollar
Yesterday Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and Shopify switched on their own dollar stablecoin, and unlike Tether or Circle, they're sharing the interest with 200 partners.
What Open USD is
- A digital dollar issued by Bridge, the stablecoin company Stripe owns, with the dollars behind it held at BlackRock, BNY and Lead Bank
- Businesses can swap dollars in and out one for one, for free, through Visa, Mastercard, Stripe or Coinbase
- It runs on four blockchains, and Stripe has made it the default for every business it serves
What that means
- Until now the interest earned on the dollars behind a stablecoin went to the company that issued it. Open USD hands almost all of it to its partners, so every one of them has a reason to push it
- The market noticed: Circle's shares fell around 17% the day Open USD was announced in June
It's starting to trade on Coinbase, Kraken and Uniswap, so it won't stay a business coin for long, and the partners earn most of the company's shares by growing it, which turns 200 payment firms into its sales team. The big US banks are building their own answer, a tokenised deposit network due in the first half of 2027, and Open Standard says it's already hearing demand from Europe for other currencies.
The Fed wrote new rules for dollar stablecoins last week, and this week the biggest names in payments launched one together, so the next dollar payment you get from abroad may not come through a bank at all.