Zach Abrams (Open Standard)

Abrams led product teams at fintech companies including Square, Coinbase, and Brex before founding Bridge, a stablecoin orchestration and issuance platform.⁠[1]

According to Bridge, much of its team had worked at Coinbase and led the development, launch, and rollout of the dollar stablecoin USDC, and had seen the potential of stablecoins as early as 2018. Bridge offered stablecoin “Orchestration” and “Issuance” services: the former uses simple APIs to convert between dollar formats (fiat, USDC, PYUSD, USDT, and others), and the latter lets developers convert these dollars into a stablecoin they can customize and benefit from. Its early use cases included stablecoin payouts, B2B cross-border payments in partnership with the Latin American exchange Bitso, and dollar savings and spending for users of Chipper Cash and Dolar App in Africa and Latin America. Bridge said it had raised $58 million from investors including Sequoia, Ribbit, Index, and Haun VenturesHaun VenturesHaun Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in 2022 by Katie Haun, a former U.S. federal prosecutor and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. It focuses on digital assets, financial infrastructure, and related frontier technologies; it raised $1.5 billion across two funds at launch and a further $1 billion in 2026.Open the full entry.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

On October 21, 2024, Bridge announced that Stripe would acquire it. Bridge recalled that when it rolled out its APIs 18 months earlier, many were questioning the usefulness of the digital asset industry and regulators, banks, and fintechs were unwilling to engage deeply with stablecoins; since then, several cross-border payments companies had integrated its APIs, Bridge had worked with government agencies to disburse aid payments to thousands of frontline workers across Latin America, and it had launched Virtual Accounts. The transaction was subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

On February 4, 2025, Stripe announced that it had completed its acquisition of Bridge. Abrams wrote on X that the acquisition had closed and that together they were scaling digital dollars to businesses everywhere, adding that stablecoins are not the future but are already transforming how people move money.⁠[4][4][4]

On June 30, 2026, Open Standard announced the stablecoin Open USD, with Abrams signing the announcement as founding CEO of Open Standard. Open Standard positioned Open USD as a stablecoin built for the internet economy and designed by the businesses growing it, with more than 140 businesses participating at the time.⁠[5][5][5][5]

On September 9, 2026, Abrams wrote that stablecoins look like better money but in practice are often worse than fiat, since businesses can use them to store assets but most cannot or will not use them to transact. He recalled working at Bridge with many fintechs, such as Meow, Slash, and Arq, which all wanted financial infrastructure that scales across borders with lower costs and faster money movement, but because the economics of building with fiat remain better in the United States, most had to run a U.S. fiat business and a global stablecoin business side by side. He said Open Standard’s business model would incentivize utility rather than assets under management.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

On September 24, 2026, Open Standard announced that Abrams would join as its full-time CEO. For the previous several months he had been leading both Bridge and Open Standard; he would now focus solely on Open Standard.⁠[1][1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/zcabrams (opens in a new window)⁠[6]