Can Open USD support Stripe's ambitions?

Author: Yokiiiya Stablehunter

Five months ago, I wrote an article titled "Stripe | The AWS of the Financial World: Why It Will Be the Biggest Winner in the Era of AI + Stablecoins," where I mentioned that Money will run on Stripe. What Stripe is doing is not just creating a better payment button, but transforming financial capabilities such as receiving payments, making payments, issuing cards, managing funds, taxes, and billing into infrastructure that developers can call upon like cloud services.

However, after the emergence of Open USD, we see that what Stripe wants to prove may not just be that money will run on Stripe. Instead, it is:

Money will not only run through Stripe.

Money may settle on a network Stripe helped define.

1. OUSD is a Key Step for Stripe to Become a Money Movement Network

The significance of OUSD lies not in it being just another stablecoin, but in providing Stripe with a larger narrative: transforming from a payments API company into a money movement network.

In the short term, it is unlikely to replace USDC or bypass all traditional financial systems. But it gives Stripe the opportunity to not only connect payments but also reorganize settlement, liquidity, and revenue distribution. In the past, we often understood Stripe as a better payment gateway, but more accurately, Stripe is an aggregation layer relying on card networks, banking systems, local clearing networks, acquiring/issuing licenses, and various traditional payment rails.

This is also its limitation.

What Stripe truly wants to break through is the strategic limitation of being "just an upper layer API of traditional payment networks." If Stripe is merely a better payments API, no matter how large it becomes, it can easily be categorized alongside Adyen, PayPal, Fiserv, Checkout.com, and acquiring frameworks, with the market assessing how much transaction volume it handles, what its take rate is, whether it can maintain its gross margin, whether card network costs will continue to rise, and whether regulations and local licenses will limit expansion.

This remains a very good company, but it is not yet a true financial network. The significance of OUSD is that it allows Stripe to push its narrative from "we help merchants connect payment methods" to "we participate in defining the next generation of commercial settlement networks."

The valuation logic of these two aspects is completely different; the former is a software and payment aggregator, while the latter is a network.

What is most valuable in the payment industry has never been just the API, but the network effects. Visa and Mastercard are valuable not because they have better-looking payment buttons, but because they organize a multi-party network: issuing banks, acquiring banks, merchants, consumers, risk control rules, dispute handling, and clearing paths all operate within the same rule system.

If Stripe wants to tell a story larger than "payment API," it must answer one question: is it possible for it to not only connect others' networks but also organize its own network? OUSD provides it with this narrative entry point. The appeal of OUSD to Stripe is not whether it is another dollar stablecoin, but that it points to four things.

First, it gives Stripe the opportunity to have a default settlement asset.

In the past, Stripe helped merchants connect to Visa, Mastercard, ACH, local wallets, and bank transfers. In the future, if OUSD can become the default settlement asset for Stripe's merchants, platforms, marketplaces, and AI agents, Stripe will not just be connecting to others' networks but will be organizing its own network.

Second, it changes economic distribution.

In traditional payments, Stripe can collect processing fees, but the underlying network fees, bank fees, card organization fees, and part of the funding revenue are with others. If the stablecoin reserve revenue, mint/redeem, liquidity, wallets, cards, and on/off-ramp can all be organized by the Stripe/Bridge system, Stripe will have the opportunity to enter a deeper layer of economics.

Third, it provides a programmable funding layer for agentic commerce.

If the underlying remains just credit cards and bank transfers, what agents can do will be constrained by authorization, risk control, settlement delays, cross-border costs, and reconciliation processes. Stablecoins cannot solve all problems, but they are closer to a money rail that machines can call upon.

Fourth, it allows Stripe to move from a software company to a network company.

If OUSD is successful, Stripe can tell a story not just of "we make payments easier," but "we are organizing the next generation of global commercial settlement networks." This is where its true importance lies. But it also requires a calm perspective.

OUSD currently resembles the narrative starting point of this ambition rather than a completed infrastructure. A stablecoin network is not something that can be announced; it requires sufficient liquidity, stable and low-friction redemption, acceptance by banks and regulators, merchants willing to hold or automatically settle, enterprise ERP, treasury, and reconciliation systems that can integrate, stable cross-chain and cross-regional experiences, and governance among participants that does not devolve into a slow decision-making alliance.

So, OUSD is not a USDC killer in the short term. It is more like Stripe asking the market a question: if future capital flows do not solely rely on traditional payment networks, then who will organize the new settlement assets, distribution networks, and economic distribution mechanisms?

2. What Does OUSD Aim to Do: Not a USDC Killer, but to Rewrite the Economic Distribution of Stablecoins

Open USD, abbreviated as OUSD, is the new dollar stablecoin announced by Open Standard on June 30, 2026. Its official definition is: a shared stablecoin for global financial activity, which means a shared stablecoin aimed at global financial activities.

It is not a "private stablecoin" issued solely by Stripe. It is governed and operated by the independent company Open Standard, which involves a group of payment companies, banks, fintech companies, crypto infrastructure companies, and merchant platforms. The official list of participants includes Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, BNY, Coinbase, Shopify, Bridge, Tempo, Privy, and others.

There is also an interesting detail: OUSD is not directly launched by Stripe. It is announced by Open Standard, and the founding CEO of Open Standard is Zach Abrams. Zach Abrams is also a co-founder/CEO of Bridge, which has already been acquired by Stripe.

So from an organizational relationship perspective, OUSD is not unrelated to Stripe. On the contrary, it is clearly positioned along the extension of Stripe/Bridge's stablecoin strategy. However, from the product and governance narrative perspective, it cannot be packaged as Stripe's own private stablecoin.

This is the subtlety of OUSD: it needs the execution capability, understanding of payment networks, and future distribution capability of Stripe and Bridge, but it must present itself through the independent entity of Open Standard as a stablecoin network shaped by multiple participants with shared governance and economic benefits.

In other words, it needs the strength of Stripe but cannot appear to be just Stripe's coin. The design focus of OUSD has three aspects.

First, minting and redeeming are free, and there are no artificially set scale limits.

Second, the revenue generated from OUSD's reserve assets, after deducting a small management fee, will be distributed to partners who promote its adoption and distribution.

Third, it adopts collaborative governance. The board of Open Standard consists of OUSD's partners, and the official hope is that it is not a private network of any one company, but a stablecoin infrastructure shaped by participants together. OUSD is not just a new dollar stablecoin; it is attempting to answer a broader commercial question:

If stablecoins are to become the infrastructure for global capital flows, should the companies that use it, distribute it, and bring transaction scenarios also participate in governance and revenue distribution?

So, what exactly does OUSD aim to do? I do not believe it is a USDC killer in the short term.

The first-mover advantage of USDC is very real. It has liquidity, exchange and DeFi scenarios, institutional trust, compliance branding, and a large number of completed integrations. Stablecoins are not something that can be easily migrated just by changing names; they have underlying trust in redemption, liquidity depth, counterparty acceptance, and operational inertia.

After the release of OUSD, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire quickly responded to the competitive concerns raised by OUSD. His core message was not that "anyone can issue stablecoins," but rather the opposite: stablecoins are a long-term accumulated platform and network effect business.

He emphasized that USDC's moat primarily comes from three things: developer and application integration, global liquidity, and integration with regulatory and financial systems.

According to Circle's official Q1 2026 data, USDC's circulation is $77 billion, and the quarterly on-chain transaction volume is $21.5 trillion. This figure may not fully explain the real commercial payment penetration rate, but it is sufficient to illustrate one thing: USDC is not a ticker that can be easily replaced; it has already become an operational stablecoin network.

This is also why framing OUSD as a "USDC killer" would be superficial. The truly interesting aspect of OUSD is not who it can immediately replace, but the path it has chosen: it is not first competing for transaction liquidity in the crypto-native world, but rather cutting in from enterprise payments, platform settlements, merchant distribution, and reserve revenue distribution.

In the existing stablecoin model, many users are actually just distributors or conduits. The more stablecoins are used, the more the issuer can gain from the revenue generated by reserve assets. While payment companies, platforms, merchants, wallets, banks, and fintech contribute to distribution and scenarios, they may not fully participate in the underlying economy.

OUSD aims to change this. It attempts to persuade enterprises: you are not just using stablecoins; you can also participate in the governance and economic distribution of this stablecoin network.

Therefore, what OUSD aims to challenge is not just USDC's market share. It challenges a more fundamental question in the stablecoin industry: who contributes to the usage scenarios of stablecoins should also share in the economic benefits of stablecoins.

From this perspective, USDC's advantages remain strong, but OUSD proposes not a simple substitution relationship but a new model of economic distribution. This also explains why it emphasizes open, neutral governance and shared economics.

Open governance is to lower the psychological costs of enterprises entering and exiting. Neutral governance is to ensure that participants believe this is not a private stablecoin of any one company. Shared economics is to allow companies that truly bring distribution and transaction volume to participate in the distribution of reserve revenue and network value.

This is not purely a technical issue; it is a business organization issue. Of course, this path is also more challenging. The larger the alliance, the higher the coordination costs. The more participants there are, the more complex the governance. The more stablecoins aim to become public infrastructure, the more they must address questions of who is responsible, who benefits, who bears responsibility, and who makes the final decisions.

Allaire's rebuttal to "everyone sharing the benefits" precisely points to this contradiction: if all income is distributed, who will continue to invest in the infrastructure? This question is not just Circle's unilateral defensive rhetoric; it is indeed a question OUSD must answer in the future.

Circle's logic is that strong issuers need to retain sufficient profits to continue building compliant, liquid, redeemable, and global financial infrastructure.

OUSD's logic is that if stablecoins are to become shared infrastructure, then the participants who contribute to distribution, scenarios, and transaction volume should also share more reserve economics and governance rights.

So this is not a simple competition of "who is cheaper." It is a competition of two ways of organizing stablecoins; OUSD is not a USDC killer in the short term.

It is more like a commercial counter-question to the USDC model: if stablecoins are truly going to become the next generation of global payment infrastructure, should they be led by a strong issuer or governed collectively by a group of commercial networks that genuinely contribute traffic, scenarios, and trust?

3. Stripe Needs More Than Just Growth; It Needs a Bigger Company Narrative

Stripe is already a very large company, serving a vast number of internet companies, SaaS, platform enterprises, marketplaces, and emerging AI companies globally. Its products have long gone beyond just payment buttons, covering a complete set of financial infrastructure that includes receiving payments, making payments, billing, taxes, risk control, card issuance, fund accounts, and business registration.

But the problem is that capital markets do not only ask whether a company is large. They also ask: what exactly is this company? This is a question Stripe has always needed to answer.

If Stripe is understood as a payment company, it will be valued within the framework of payment companies. The market will look at its transaction processing scale, take rate, gross margin, card organization costs, competitive intensity, regulatory pressure, and whether it can maintain high growth in the long term.

If Stripe is understood as a software company, it will encounter another issue: a significant portion of its revenue structure is driven by payment volume, unlike pure SaaS, which has a very clear subscription revenue and software gross margin model.

Therefore, the most imaginative narrative for Stripe has never been "we are a payment company," nor simply "we are a SaaS company."

Instead, it is: we are the financial infrastructure of the internet economy. Five months ago, I wrote that it is "the AWS of the financial world," and that is what I meant.

The core of AWS is not that it has many APIs, but that enterprises place their computing, storage, databases, networks, security, and deployment processes on it. It does not provide a single tool but a default operating environment.

What Stripe wants to become is not just a single payment tool. It wants to be the default financial operating environment for internet commerce, which is why OUSD is important to Stripe.

Because if Stripe merely continues to package more traditional financial capabilities as APIs, it is still doing abstraction on top of the existing financial system. It can become more user-friendly, more complete, and more like a financial OS, but the underlying settlement assets, clearing networks, and part of the economic revenue it relies on are still in others' hands.

OUSD provides it with an opportunity to delve into the money layer. From this perspective, actions like Bridge, Open Issuance, OUSD, Privy, agentic commerce, and Tempo are not isolated. Bridge allows Stripe to acquire stablecoin issuance/orchestration capabilities. Open Issuance enables enterprises to issue and manage their own stablecoins. OUSD provides an entry point for a shared stablecoin and alliance network. Privy brings Stripe closer to wallets, identity, and user-side crypto-native onboarding. Tempo is a payments-focused blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, pointing towards stablecoin payments and settlement rails. Agentic commerce provides new use cases for all of this: in the future, if AI agents truly initiate purchases, subscriptions, service calls, and settlements on behalf of users, enterprises, and software systems, then payments will no longer just be an action of a person clicking a checkout button, but will become a continuous flow of funds occurring between software.

When viewed together, the story Stripe wants to tell is not just: we make payments easier. Rather, it is: we enable the flow of funds in the next generation of internet economy to be called upon by software, managed by enterprises, and settled globally.

This is the narrative of the money movement network. It is larger than payments API and larger than "supporting stablecoin payments."

Of course, this story is still just a story for now. OUSD has not yet become a real default settlement asset, and agentic commerce has not yet entered a large-scale commercialization phase. Whether enterprises are willing to hold stablecoins, whether financial systems can integrate, how regulators view it, and how traditional payment networks will react, all these questions remain unanswered.

But company narratives do not wait until everything is completed to emerge; they often arise when a company is about to cross its existing boundaries.

The boundary Stripe is now crossing is from "I help you connect payments" to "I help you organize capital flows."

OUSD is not just a new competitor in the stablecoin market. It is a signal that Stripe is pushing itself from a payment company towards a money movement network.

Five months ago, I wrote: Money will run on Stripe.

Looking at it today, this statement can be pushed one step further. What Stripe wants to prove is:

Money may settle on a network Stripe helped define.