140 Giants Join Forces to Launch Coin, Circle Plummets 17% Overnight: Stablecoin War Enters "Android Moment"
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140 Giants Join Forces to Launch Coin, Circle Plummets 17% Overnight: Stablecoin War Enters "Android Moment"
The competitive landscape of the stablecoin market has permanently changed.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: TechFlow
On June 30, something happened in the stablecoin market significant enough to rewrite the industry landscape.
A new company named Open Standard announced the launch of the Open USD (OUSD) stablecoin, with a partner list behind it that reads like a roster of the global fintech industry—Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, BNY, Ripple, American Express, DBS, Standard Chartered, DoorDash... over 140 companies jointly endorsing it.
As soon as the news broke, Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) stock price plummeted over 15% that day, touching $63.99 at one point during trading, accumulating a drop of over 55% from the May high. Billions of dollars in market value evaporated.
This was like a coup in the stablecoin industry, and the people who launched the coup happened to be Circle's closest partners previously.
Stripe Orchestrates, Bridge Founder Takes the Helm
Open Standard's founding CEO is Zach Abrams, a person of significant stature.
Abrams is the co-founder of Bridge, this stablecoin infrastructure company was acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in 2024, setting the record for the largest acquisition in the crypto industry at the time. Before founding Bridge, Abrams was responsible for consumer products at Coinbase, and his earlier entrepreneurial venture was a P2P payment app called Evenly, which was later acquired by Square.
From his resume, it is clear that he is one of the most knowledgeable operators in the field of stablecoin payment infrastructure. He posted on X, comparing: "Just as the mobile industry needs Android, financial services need Open USD to scale stablecoin adoption."
This metaphor accurately points out OUSD's positioning: it does not want to be an exclusive product of a single company, but rather an open standard for the stablecoin world, a neutral infrastructure where everyone can participate and everyone can benefit.
Stripe's role behind the scenes is particularly critical. As one of the largest online payment processors globally, Stripe has clearly stated that OUSD will become the default stablecoin used by enterprises on its platform. This commitment alone means that massive merchant payment traffic will flow through OUSD.
From "Who Has the Largest Issuance" to "Who Has the Strongest Network"
Over the past decade, the competition formula for stablecoins was simple: whoever has the largest issuance is the winner. Tether dominated the market with USDT's $145 billion circulation, while Circle sat firmly in second place with USDC's approximately $75 billion circulation. Issuers earned interest on reserves, distribution partners took a cut, and the economic interests of the entire value chain were highly concentrated in the hands of the issuers.
The emergence of OUSD has fundamentally changed this game rule.
Its core design has three disruptive features:
Zero-fee Minting and Redemption: Any partner can create or redeem OUSD unlimitedly at a 1:1 USD exchange rate without charging any fees. This directly targets the cost pain points of existing stablecoins when used by large-scale enterprises.
Reserve Revenue Sharing: Interest income generated by OUSD reserve assets, after deducting a small management fee, is almost entirely distributed to ecosystem partners. Whoever helps promote OUSD benefits from it. This stands in sharp contrast to the model where USDC and USDT issuers exclusively retain reserve revenue.
Consortium Governance: Open Standard operates as an independent company, with a board composed of partners; no single institution can unilaterally control reserve policies or redemption mechanisms. This eliminates the counterparty risk concerns often raised by corporate finance departments when using USDC and USDT.
In terms of technical deployment, OUSD is planned to launch later in 2026, initially supporting four chains: Solana, Polygon, Base (Coinbase's L2), and Stellar, and will subsequently expand to other networks such as Tempo. The strategy of launching on four chains simultaneously contrasts with the gradual path of USDC and USDT expanding chain by chain, directly aiming to solve the problem of fragmented cross-chain stablecoin liquidity.
PYMNTS' comment hit the nail on the head: the stablecoin race has shifted from "which token wins" to "which network becomes the default financial infrastructure for the global digital dollar."
Precisely Striking Circle's Achilles' Heel
To understand why the emergence of OUSD caused Circle's stock price to collapse instantly, one must first see how fragile Circle's business model is.
Circle's revenue sources are extremely singular. Full-year 2025 revenue was $2.75 billion, the vast majority of which came from interest income on USDC reserve assets. Q4 single-quarter reserve income was $733 million, accounting for over 95% of total revenue. In other words, Circle is essentially not a technology company, but an interest rate-sensitive financial infrastructure company—the money it earns is the interest generated from users' USDC dollars buying U.S. short-term Treasury bills.
Even more critical is the cost structure. According to Circle's IPO prospectus and financial report disclosures, the revenue sharing agreement between Coinbase and Circle stipulates: for reserve income generated by USDC held on the Coinbase platform, Coinbase takes 100%; for reserve income generated elsewhere, Coinbase and Circle split it 50-50. In 2024, Circle paid a total of $908 million in distribution fees to Coinbase, accounting for approximately 54% of its total revenue.
That is to say, for every $1 Circle earns, it must hand over 54 cents to Coinbase, while Coinbase neither issues USDC nor manages USDC's reserves.
The core problem with this structure lies in: Circle's pricing power is not in its own hands. The distribution agreement cannot be unilaterally terminated and automatically renews on a three-year cycle. Whether Circle's profit margin can improve largely depends on whether it can establish diversified distribution channels outside of Coinbase.
And the emergence of OUSD is precisely to fundamentally dismantle this issuer-centric business model. When reserve revenue no longer belongs to the issuer but is returned to the entire network, the business logic on which Circle relies for survival—"issue coins, earn interest, share a bit with channels"—faces an existential challenge.
Dragonfly partner Rob Hadick stated plainly: "The list of these top partners clearly indicates that this poses a real threat to Circle's business." He added that Stripe's extensive financial product line allows the consortium to "uniquely undermine Circle's economic model."
Coinbase's "Betrayal": The Most Ironic Scene
The most dramatic plot in the entire event is that Coinbase appears in both camps simultaneously.
Coinbase is both Circle's largest distribution partner, USDC's most important channel, and also one of OUSD's over 140 founding partners. Moreover, it is worth noting that one of the first blockchains OUSD launches on is Base, Coinbase's own Layer 2 network.
What does this mean? Coinbase is stepping on Circle's shoulder with one foot, while stepping towards a new world that may marginalize Circle with the other.
From Coinbase's perspective, this choice has its economic rationality. Under OUSD's consortium governance model, Coinbase is no longer just a "middleman" earning a cut, but becomes a "shareholder" with governance rights and long-term revenue rights. In CoinDesk's analysis, Coinbase's potential calculation is: owning a governance share of a new stablecoin running on its own blockchain is more valuable in the long run than collecting fees as a middleman for Circle's products.
BlackRock's participation adds another dimension. This world's largest asset management company has already deeply deployed in the crypto field through products like Bitcoin ETFs and tokenized money market funds. Supporting a consortium stablecoin aligns perfectly with its strategy of building institutional-grade crypto infrastructure. BlackRock Global Head of Market Development Samara Cohen stated that Open USD provides enterprises with more options to access tokenized value and internet-native payment networks.
When your largest distributor, largest asset management partner, and largest payment network partner collectively stand on the opposite side, the situation is not simply "one more competitor."
Déjà Vu: Lessons from USDG
It is worth noting that OUSD is not the first stablecoin to attempt the "consortium + revenue sharing" model.
In November 2024, Paxos launched USDG (Global Dollar), supported by the Global Dollar Network, with founding partners including Robinhood, Kraken, Galaxy Digital, etc. USDG also adopts a reserve revenue sharing mechanism, encouraging exchanges, wallets, and payment platforms to integrate and promote the stablecoin.
A year and a half later, USDG's market cap is approximately $2.75 billion. In the stablecoin market with a total market cap exceeding $315 billion, this figure is negligible. Moreover, on-chain data shows that USDG holdings are highly concentrated in top wallets, and the real retail adoption rate is questionable.
CoinDesk analysts also raised similar cautious views: although OUSD has a luxurious lineup, consortium stablecoins have precedents, and adoption rates have always faced challenges.
However, there is a fundamental difference in magnitude between OUSD and USDG. USDG's partners are mainly concentrated in crypto-native exchanges and fintech companies, while OUSD's over 140 partners span traditional payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express), tech giants (Google, Shopify, IBM), mainstream banks (BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, US Bank), and crypto infrastructure (Coinbase, Ripple, OKX, Bybit); coverage and distribution capabilities are completely on different levels.
More critically, Stripe has committed to setting OUSD as the default enterprise stablecoin. The real transaction volume brought by this commitment alone may exceed USDG's entire circulation to date.
Circle Is Not Powerless
Amidst a chorus of bearish voices, it is also necessary to see that Circle's current actual situation is not irretrievable.
First, OUSD is currently just an announcement; the actual token has not yet launched. From announcement to formal operation, and then to establishing real market circulation and user trust, there are numerous execution obstacles in between. Over 140 partners each have their own interest demands; whether consortium governance can maintain cohesion when facing controversial decisions is a fundamental unknown.
Second, Circle does not rely entirely on reserve income. Although reserve interest currently accounts for the absolute majority of income, Circle is also actively expanding new business lines: Circle Payments Network (CPN) has 55 financial institutions registered; USYC tokenized assets exceeded $1.5 billion; Arc public chain testnet has over 100 participants, with daily transaction volume reaching 2.3 million. Q4 2025 "other income" reached $37 million, a year-over-year increase of nearly 10 times.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire's response on X was also quite calm: "Stablecoins represent one of the largest market opportunities globally... We welcome continuous innovation and competition."
However, having said that, Wall Street is not buying it. CRCL's closing price that day fell to around $65, down nearly 40% from a month ago. Mizuho analysts have lowered the target price from $135 to $85. The market's vote is clear: regardless of whether OUSD ultimately succeeds, the era where Circle exclusively enjoys stablecoin dividends may have come to an end.
Endgame Deduction: Stablecoin's TCP/IP Moment?
If we pull the vision further, the emergence of OUSD marks that the stablecoin industry is undergoing a paradigm-level shift.
The past decade belonged to stablecoin issuers; whoever controls issuance controls the network, whoever controls the network monopolizes profits. Tether earns over $13 billion a year, with profit margins comparable to the top technology companies, relying on this logic.
But when over 140 companies spanning payments, banking, technology, and crypto join forces, deciding no longer to work for a single issuer, but to co-build an open standard, revenue-sharing infrastructure, the essence of the game changes.
A Forbes comment compared this to the evolution of the internet: technologies that truly change the world, from the internet to mobile networks, are because they became shared infrastructure upon which anyone can build. When underlying standards are open, the greatest value no longer belongs to the protocol itself, but to the platforms, applications, and networks built upon the protocol.
The bet OUSD is making is: The first decade of stablecoins belongs to token issuers, but the next decade will belong to those who own the ecosystem.
Of course, whether this bet can succeed depends on several core variables: What will be the composition and transparency of reserve assets after OUSD launches? How will Open Standard's own operational sustainability be guaranteed under the zero-fee model? Can over 140 partners avoid the inefficiency of multi-party gaming in actual governance? And, will end users and developers really vote with their feet and migrate from USDC and USDT?
The answers to these questions may not be known until OUSD officially launches at the end of 2026. But one thing is already clear: on June 30, the competitive landscape of the stablecoin market changed permanently.
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