A consortium of financial giants are taking aim at the top two stablecoin issuers. On Tuesday, Open Standard, a company that says it’s partnered with Stripe, Visa, BlackRock and over 140 other businesses, announced that it will launch a new stablecoin called Open USD, or OUSD. The two largest stablecoin issuers, Tether and Circle, are notably not part of the new consortium.
OUSD will launch later this year and is structured to return most reserve revenue, or interest earned on the assets backing it, minus a small management fee, to participants. Open Standard did not disclose on which blockchain the stablecoin will operate.
“It’s a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it,” Zach Abrams, interim CEO of Open Standard, said in a statement. Abrams is also the cofounder of the stablecoin startup Bridge, which Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2025.
The new initiative appears to be a serious challenge to Tether and Circle, which have long dominated the market for stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar. In April, Tether’s stablecoin, USDT, accounted for about 62% of the stablecoin market, while Circle’s USDC held roughly 25%, according to a report from the crypto analytics company CoinGecko.
Circle’s stock slipped 13% after the announcement and now trades at $66 per share.
“We welcome continued innovation and competition in the space,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire wrote on X following the announcement.
Tether did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Corporate stablecoin race
Open USD is the latest in a flood of new stablecoins after July 2025, when President Donald Trump signed into law the Genius Act, which establishes a regulatory framework for the tokens. Several corporations have also begun to experiment with stablecoins. In November, payments provider Klarna launched KlarnaUSD. Retail giants Amazon and Walmart have also expressed interest in issuing their own stablecoins.
Meanwhile, consortiums in crypto between large corporate players aren’t novel. In November 2024, Singapore-based Paxos launched USDG, a stablecoin backed by the Global Dollar Network, a pool of major crypto, fintech, and traditional finance firms. Participants include Mastercard, Robinhood, and Kraken.
There have also been attempts to create shared blockchain networks. The fintech Stripe worked with the venture firm Paradigm, along with a number of design partners, to launch Tempo, a blockchain created to support stablecoin payments.
And major banks have also joined forces to launch a shared deposit network. Earlier this month, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and others unveiled The Clearing House, a payments system that lets bank deposits move as digital tokens over blockchain-style rails.
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