Author: Hu Yilin
The launch of Open USD has shifted the stablecoin competition from a market battle among crypto startups to an infrastructure competition involving traditional finance, payment networks, technology platforms, and public chain ecosystems. Regarding this new alliance involving over 140 institutions, scholar Hu Yilin believes stablecoins are not the moderates of the crypto revolution, but are more akin to "royalist reformers" within the old monetary system: they inherit the efficiency of blockchain but preserve the central role of the US dollar and the Federal Reserve. The true crypto revolution must ultimately return to a more fundamental question: must market life rely on a central bank as the core of the monetary order?
The Launch of Open USD: Stablecoins Shift from Product Competition to Alliance Infrastructure
On June 30, Open Standard announced the launch of Open USD, a US dollar stablecoin designed for global capital flows. According to official descriptions, Open USD focuses on three design principles: businesses can mint and redeem at zero cost; reserve income is distributed to partners after deducting minimal management fees; and it is operated by Open Standard, an independent company, with governance involving a board of directors composed of partners. The participant list spans the payment, banking, technology, and crypto industries, including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, OCBC, Google, Shopify, Coinbase, Solana, Base, Ripple, MetaMask, Aave, and others.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Open USD plans to launch later this year on networks like Base and Solana, with about 140 companies already signed up to use it; the report also noted that USDT and USDC remain the two largest stablecoins, with a combined market cap of approximately $260 billion. Barron's observed that following the announcement of Open USD, share prices of related companies like Circle and Coinbase came under pressure, as the new alliance directly threatens the stablecoin business model of USDC.
On the surface, this represents an escalation of competition in the stablecoin industry: more companies joining, more access channels, and a redesigned reserve income distribution mechanism. However, in Hu Yilin's view, the greater significance of Open USD lies not in how much market share it might take from USDC or USDT, but in what it reveals about the historical position of stablecoins themselves: stablecoins do not truly challenge the dollar standard; they merely make the dollar standard operate more efficiently.
Stablecoins Are Not "Moderates," but "Royalists"
Hu Yilin supports the development of stablecoins because they directly impact the fiat currency and banking systems, forcing changes in real political and economic structures. However, he simultaneously emphasizes that supporting stablecoins as a tool does not equate to recognizing them as the completed form of the crypto revolution.
He previously likened stablecoins to the Tychonic system in the Copernican Revolution: the Tychonic system absorbed many technical advantages of the new astronomy and could explain more phenomena, making it more acceptable to traditional authorities during the revolution; but it rejected the most crucial point—refusing to let the Earth move. Stablecoins are similar. They inherit the settlement efficiency, programmability, global liquidity, and cross-border payment advantages of blockchain, but refuse to move the US dollar from its central position.
Discussing Open USD, Hu Yilin further distinguishes between "moderates" and "royalists." He says: "I think someone like Michael Saylor is more of a 'moderate.' He also wants compatibility with the old system, but he holds onto the core revolutionary point of the 'bitcoin standard.'" In other words, the Saylor-style approach can accept public companies, accounting standards, debt financing, capital markets, and regulatory frameworks, but it still regards Bitcoin as the new standard asset. It compromises with the old system but does not abandon the revolutionary core of "the emperor can be replaced."
Stablecoins are different. Hu Yilin says: "Stablecoins certainly have historical significance, but they are not true revolutionaries." In his view, stablecoins are more like reformists within the old system, believing that "the Emperor (the US dollar, the Federal Reserve) is good; it's just that the lower execution system is somewhat bloated and inefficient. The old Eastern Depot didn't do well, so now the Western Depot will improve it."
This metaphor sharply points out the inherent limitation of stablecoins: they oppose not the centrality of the dollar, but the old payment systems, bank clearing networks, cross-border transfer systems, and inefficient financial intermediaries. They want to replace the grassroots bureaucracy, not the supreme authority.
Therefore, when the crypto revolution could only touch "executive systems" like banks, payment companies, SWIFT, Visa, and Alipay, stablecoins and more radical cryptocurrency routes seemed to share a direction: they both opposed the old financial system's costliness, slowness, and opacity. But once the issue touches the US dollar, US treasury bonds, the Federal Reserve, and the fiat currency standard, the divergence becomes apparent. Hu Yilin says stablecoins "from the very beginning prevent the revolution from deepening further." This is not to say stablecoins have no progressive significance, but rather that their progressive significance is confined from the outset within the old monetary order.
When the Old System Takes the Field Itself, What's Left for Stablecoin Entrepreneurs?
The uniqueness of Open USD lies in the fact that it is not a new coin launched by a single crypto startup team, but a consortium-style project involving payment companies, banks, technology platforms, asset management institutions, and public chain ecosystems. Open Standard officially emphasizes that it aims to give enterprises greater participation in stablecoin reserve income, governance, and large-scale usage.
This is precisely where Hu Yilin sees the symbolic significance of Open USD. In the past, a core narrative of US dollar stablecoins was: traditional finance is too slow, expensive, and closed, so crypto companies use blockchain to improve its efficiency. But now, traditional finance and payment giants are starting to organize their own stablecoin networks. The old system is no longer just the object of transformation but has directly become the initiator and governor of stablecoin infrastructure.
Hu Yilin believes this constitutes an irony for native stablecoin companies like Circle: if the mission of stablecoins is to serve the dollar system, be compatible with the banking system, and improve payment efficiency, then when institutions like Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Google, and Coinbase jointly launch their own stablecoin network, the original stablecoin entrepreneurs can hardly claim they possess irreplaceable revolutionary legitimacy.
He frames this issue as a series of questions: Who exactly do stablecoins aim to revolutionize? SWIFT? What if interbank settlements also start using stablecoins? Payment networks like Visa and Alipay? What if they themselves accept, issue, or participate in stablecoin networks?
In his view, if the goal of stablecoins is merely for the old system to adopt blockchain payment technology, then when the old system adopts stablecoins, the stablecoin movement can declare success and should even "retire after accomplishing its mission." But if these native stablecoin companies are still unwilling to be co-opted, they must re-articulate their fundamental difference from the old system.
"If you still feel unwilling, you still have to return to the path of decentralization, give up compromise, and continue the revolution," says Hu Yilin.
"Drawing a clear line" here does not necessarily take only one form. Hu Yilin does not demand all projects follow the Bitcoin route. One can adhere to a coin standard, insist on decentralized governance, emphasize censorship resistance, or champion self-custody, non-freezability, open protocols, and exit rights. But the key is that native crypto innovators must retain some truly "disobedient" element.
"The coin standard is, of course, the most hardcore. Emphasizing governance structure is also possible; emphasizing censorship resistance is also possible. But you must emphasize something truly heterodox," he says.
This statement highlights the awkwardness of the stablecoin narrative: when a project builds its entire selling point on compliance, efficiency, low cost, institution-friendliness, and compatibility with old finance, it ultimately may not overthrow the old system but be absorbed by it as a new department.
A Blockchain Upgrade Package for Dollar Hegemony
Hu Yilin agrees with a more macro assessment: the more successful US dollar stablecoins become, it does not necessarily mean crypto becomes more successful; instead, it may mean the dollar system becomes more successful.
If global cross-border e-commerce, remittances, on-chain transactions, RWAs, DeFi, and corporate settlements increasingly use US dollar stablecoins, what gets weakened may be local banking systems, traditional cross-border payment networks, and some capital controls, but what gets strengthened remains US dollar denomination, US treasury bond reserves, and the US regulatory framework.
Open USD is a concentrated manifestation of this trend. It uses blockchain as a new track for capital flows, but the unit of account is still the US dollar, the underlying income still comes from reserve assets, and the governance structure involves corporate alliances and financial institutions. It is not an anti-dollar financial revolution, but more like a blockchain upgrade package for dollar hegemony.
This also explains why Hu Yilin believes stablecoins are becoming the long-term adversary of most native cryptocurrencies. The issue is not just that stablecoins take over the medium of exchange function, but that they may reshape the standard structure of the on-chain world.
If the unit of account for on-chain finance is US dollar stablecoins, collateral assets are US treasury bonds and RWAs, the source of income is traditional financial assets, and users' value anchor is also the US dollar, then greater on-chain activity does not necessarily mean ETH, SOL, or other underlying chain native tokens gain greater monetary premium. The on-chain world can prosper, but wealth accumulates in off-chain US dollar assets, stablecoin issuers, and traditional financial income structures. As Hu Yilin previously stated, stablecoins break the logic that "the more prosperous the on-chain world, the more the native token appreciates," turning it into "the more prosperous the on-chain world, the richer the off-chain world."
"Selling Fuel" Is Fine, But Don't Degrade a Civilization-Level Narrative to a Transaction Fee Narrative
The stablecoin issue also leads Hu Yilin to revisit his criticism of Ethereum's "oil" narrative. Many Ethereum supporters argue that even if the on-chain world primarily uses USDT, USDC, or Open USD, transactions still require burning ETH, DeFi activities still generate transaction fees, and L2 solutions still settle on the mainnet; therefore, ETH will still benefit from on-chain prosperity.
Hu Yilin's rebuttal is: Transaction fees certainly have value, but transaction fees are not a monetary standard.
He continues with the gas metaphor commonly used in the Ethereum community but pushes it in the opposite direction. "Gas prices cannot be infinite because when gas becomes expensive enough, people will have a stronger incentive to seek alternative energy sources," he says. Moreover, replacing Ethereum is much easier than replacing gasoline infrastructure. Switching a car from gasoline to electric requires a new supply chain and product design; but migrating a DeFi protocol from Ethereum to a compatible public chain involves much lower technical barriers.
In his view, if Ethereum relies solely on transaction fee revenue, it will encounter the valuation ceiling of an infrastructure service provider. Exchanges, clearinghouses, and payment networks can be important, but their revenue scale does not equal the monetary premium of a standard asset. Hu Yilin asks rhetorically: How much does the NASDAQ exchange earn in fees per year? Do the combined net revenues of all global stock exchanges match the revenue of a single company like Apple?
However, he does not believe all public chains must carry the same revolutionary mission. Ambitions for chains like Solana were never that grand; their positioning is closer to "being a strong competitor at the corporate level," such as becoming a high-performance alternative to Ethereum. Hu Yilin says that if a project's "original positioning is to sell fuel, then of course it can accept that positioning." For such chains, transaction fees, performance, ecosystem, developer experience, and application migration capabilities are the core metrics they can compete on.
The problem, he suggests, is that not all crypto assets can be content with "selling fuel." Hu Yilin distinguishes three types of projects: first is Bitcoin, which from its inception aimed for monetary revolution; second is Ethereum, which wants to be a "world computer" and achieve a civilization-level innovation; third are many new, smaller tokens, which lack traditional capital backing and must rely on grand narratives to attract attention and trust.
Therefore, the real division is not whether every coin should tell a revolutionary story, but rather: any project aspiring to a higher ceiling cannot avoid the revolutionary narrative. You can choose to be only a block space service provider, only a high-performance chain, only a financial application platform. But if you claim you want to change the world, restructure civilization's infrastructure, and become the next generation of money or the next internet, then you cannot degrade your native token narrative to that of a transactional fuel fee.
The Copernican Moment of the Crypto Revolution: The Earth Can Move
In the history of astronomy, the key to the Copernican Revolution was not just a simpler computational model, but people accepting a counterintuitive fact: the Earth can move, and daily life does not collapse as a result.
Hu Yilin believes the monetary revolution of blockchain and Bitcoin faces a similar ideological threshold. The true Copernican moment is not stablecoins making cross-border transfers cheaper, nor banks learning to use on-chain settlements, but market participants beginning to realize: economic life may not need a fixed central bank as the core of the monetary order.
"The key is liberating people's thinking: the Earth can move, and my stable, grounded life does not depend on the Earth being stationary," says Hu Yilin. Translated to the monetary issue, the core concept is: "Our lives, normal market transactions, do not depend on a fixed central bank. We don't need a central bank to intervene constantly to maintain market stability. What money is and what its value is—these are determined spontaneously by the market, by every decentralized, specific transaction. It doesn't require a specific institution to decree it."
This is also his fundamental reason for insisting on the Bitcoin standard and criticizing the stablecoin standard. Stablecoins can improve efficiency, serve as transitional tools, and act as bridges between the real world and the on-chain world. But if the on-chain world ultimately still uses the US dollar for pricing, US treasury bonds as underlying assets, and central bank money as the ultimate measure of value, then the so-called "blockchain revolution" is merely an add-on to the dollar system.
The launch of Open USD makes this debate clearer. It may be an important step toward the commercialization, institutionalization, and scaling of stablecoins; but from the perspective of crypto's original ideals, it may also mark a successful co-optation of blockchain technology by the old system.
Hu Yilin does not deny the historical significance of stablecoins. But historical significance does not equal the completion of a revolution. The Tychonic system was once popular precisely because it could accommodate new technology and old authority; but what truly changed the world's picture was still the new paradigm that let the Earth move.
For the crypto world, the question is similar: if the dollar never moves, if the Federal Reserve remains forever at the center, then no matter how open or efficient stablecoins become, they are merely precision instruments of the old universe. The true revolution awaits the market's belief that the monetary order can revolve without that central pivot.
