Open Standard (Stablecoin Company)

At its founding, Open Standard defined its mission as building internet-native money, enabling all businesses to move money on infrastructure that is cheaper, faster, more global, and more programmable.⁠[1][1]

On June 30, 2026, Open Standard announced Open USD, a new stablecoin for global money movement. It argued that minting and redemption fees for most stablecoins are prohibitively expensive at larger volumes, that businesses often cannot benefit from the revenue earned on the underlying reserves, and that developers have little recourse when third-party issuers’ roadmaps do not meet their needs. Open USD set out three design principles in response: businesses can mint and redeem at no cost and with no artificial volume limits; partners receive all of the earnings from the reserves, less a small management fee to cover operating costs; and the stablecoin is operated by Open Standard, an independent company whose board is made up of partners, so that decisions are made in the collective interest rather than that of a single entity.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

More than 140 businesses took part at the announcement, spanning payment networks and fintechs (such as Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, Adyen, and Klarna), banks and asset managers (such as BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry, BNY, Standard Chartered, BBVA, and DBS), large companies and platforms (such as Google, Samsung Electronics, Shopify, and DoorDash), and crypto companies (such as Coinbase, SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry, OKXOKXOKX is a global digital-asset trading platform that began operating in 2017 under the name OKEx. Different regional entities provide trading, wallet, payment and related services; the global platform, OKCoin and locally licensed entities must be distinguished.Open the full entry, RippleRippleRipple is an American fintech company, legally named Ripple Labs Inc., that provides banks, payment providers, funds, and businesses with blockchain- and digital asset-based cross-border payments, digital asset custody, a U.S. dollar stablecoin, prime brokerage, and corporate treasury management services. Its business makes extensive use of the public XRP Ledger blockchain and its native token XRP, but neither is the same as the company itself; from 2020 to 2025, the company fought a nearly five-year legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over whether its XRP sales were unregistered securities offerings.Open the full entry, and MetaMask). Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s president of technology and business, said Open USD would be the default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe; Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said Visa would bring the risk standards and operational rigor it applies to its global network to Open USD. Open Standard said at the time that Open USD would go live later that year.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

On September 9, 2026, founding CEO Zach AbramsZach Abrams (Open Standard)Zach Abrams is a stablecoin entrepreneur who co-founded the stablecoin orchestration and issuance platform Bridge (acquired by Stripe in 2025) and is the founding CEO of the stablecoin company Open Standard.Open the full entry wrote that the company had received thousands of inquiries from businesses since the announcement at the beginning of the summer. He argued that stablecoins look like better money but in practice are often worse than fiat: businesses can use them to store assets, but most cannot or will not use them to transact. He cited examples: card processors want to settle in stablecoins, exchanges want to use them as the primary trading pair for tokenized trading, corporate treasurers want to move in and out of tokenized money market funds when cash sits idle for minutes or even seconds, and neobanks want to build unified cross-border financial stacks on them, but these needs are held back by issuers’ economics, which revolve around assets under management, and by an exit cost of 5–10 basis points on each transaction.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

Abrams said Open Standard’s business model would incentivize utility rather than assets under management: it would share as much reserve revenue as possible with participating businesses, with every developer building with Open USD receiving a proportionate share of rewards; it would charge developers a small fee on transactions, similar to how interbank transfers are priced; it would measure its success by transaction volume and its growth; and businesses would not pay the “exit” fees common to other stablecoins.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

On September 24, 2026, Open Standard announced its company structure: Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe, and Visa would join as the initial founding partners, each investing in the company and helping establish OUSD supply, delivering more than $1 billion in near-term launch liquidity, and the company anticipated adding a limited number of additional founding partners soon. Once OUSD was live, all founders and participating partners would be able to earn equity in the company based on the supply and activity they drive on their platforms; over time the company would establish a board of directors drawn from its founders and representing its shareholders, giving the partners that drive the most growth of OUSD a meaningful role in the company’s direction.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

The same announcement named Zach Abrams as the company’s full-time CEO. For the previous several months he had been leading both Bridge, the stablecoin orchestration and issuance platform he founded, and Open Standard; he would now focus solely on Open Standard.⁠[4][4][4]

On September 30, 2026, OUSD went live, allowing businesses and developers to start building internet-native financial services and products with it for use cases spanning banking, cross-border payments, settlement, and institutional trading. OUSD is natively supported on four blockchains, Base, Ethereum, Solana, and Tempo, with Coinbase, KrakenKrakenKraken is a digital-asset trading platform founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell and Thanh Luu and launched for trading in 2013. As Payward’s flagship brand, it has expanded into spot and derivatives trading, equities, tokenized assets, custody and payments through jurisdiction-specific entities.Open the full entry, and Uniswap as the first trading venues. It is issued by Bridge, a Stripe company, with reserves held at BlackRock, Lead Bank, and other large financial institutions, and reserve attestations are published monthly. At launch, Open Standard had more than 200 partners.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5]

OUSD offers four integration paths: Stripe (including Bridge and Privy) provides virtual accounts, payment orchestration, swaps, on- and off-ramps, wallets, cards, and FX; Mastercard provides swaps, sending and receiving funds, settlement, and wallets through an API or portal; Coinbase provides 1:1 conversions, wallets, trading, custody, and financing; and Visa provides programmable APIs through its Stablecoin Platform. All paths support minting and burning OUSD at a 1:1 USD rate at no cost. Businesses could begin building through BVNK, Stripe, and the Visa Stablecoin Platform on launch day, and through Coinbase from October 1.⁠[6][6][6][6][5][5]

The issuer, Bridge, said the same day that it would not charge fees for minting or redeeming OUSD or impose liquidity restrictions that delay those transactions, and that businesses joining Open Standard could earn rewards on OUSD balances held at Bridge. Bridge explained that OUSD is currently issued by Bridge Building Inc.; Bridge National Trust Bank, which received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to organize, is a separate legal entity that is not yet operational and does not issue OUSD.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

Open Standard says it has an ownership and corporate governance structure that ensures decisions are made in the collective interest, and that it will be governed by a board of directors drawn from its founding partners and representing its shareholders. Joining Open Standard means adopting Open USD as a core transactional asset within one’s platform or service; participants gain technical documentation and integration support and the opportunity to earn rewards and equity based on their distribution of OUSD, and a platform must sign up as a partner to earn rewards.⁠[8][1][1][1][6]

As of October 21, 2026, its partner list included organizations such as AaveAaveAave is a decentralized, non-custodial lending protocol deployed on Ethereum and several other public blockchains, where users can deposit crypto assets into liquidity pools to earn interest or borrow on an overcollateralized basis. The protocol is governed by the Aave DAO, made up of AAVE token holders.Open the full entry, American Express, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, Mastercard, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Stripe, UBSUBSUBS is a global financial group headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, operating wealth management, Swiss personal and corporate banking, asset management and investment banking. Its modern bank emerged from a 1998 merger, its holding company was incorporated in 2014, and it acquired Credit Suisse in 2023.Open the full entry, Uniswap, Visa, and Western Union. Under its rules, network partners may promote OUSD globally except in the European Economic Area and regions including Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela; partners are also prohibited from promoting OUSD for uses such as gambling, unlawful prediction markets, mixing, and weapons.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10]

Open Standard: Official website: https://joinopenstandard.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

X: Public account: https://x.com/openstandard (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openstandard (opens in a new window)⁠[8]