Author: Hu Yilin
The launch of Open USD has shifted the stablecoin competition from a market battle among crypto startups to an infrastructure struggle involving traditional finance, payment networks, technology platforms, and public blockchain ecosystems. Regarding this new alliance with over 140 participating institutions, scholar Hu Yilin argues that stablecoins are not the moderate faction of the crypto revolution but rather resemble 'royalist reformers' within the old monetary system: they inherit the efficiency of blockchain but preserve the central position of the U.S. dollar and the Federal Reserve. The true crypto revolution ultimately returns to a more fundamental question: must market life depend on a central bank as the center of monetary order?
The Arrival of Open USD: Stablecoins Evolve from Product Competition to Alliance Infrastructure
On June 30, Open Standard announced the launch of Open USD, a U.S. dollar stablecoin for global capital flows. According to the official introduction, Open USD focuses on three design features: enterprises can mint and redeem at zero cost; reserve earnings, after deducting a small management fee, are distributed to partners; it is operated by the independent company Open Standard, with governance participation from partners forming a board. The list of participants spans payments, banking, technology, and the crypto industry, 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 be available 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 by market cap, with a combined valuation of approximately $260 billion. Barron's observed that following the announcement of Open USD, shares of related companies like Circle and Coinbase came under pressure, as the new alliance directly threatens the stablecoin business model that USDC is part of.
On the surface, this represents an escalation of competition within the stablecoin industry: more companies joining, more access channels, and a redesigned reserve earnings 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 enable the dollar standard to operate more efficiently.
Stablecoins Are Not the 'Moderate Faction,' But the 'Royalists'
Hu Yilin supports the development of stablecoins because they directly impact fiat currency and the banking system, forcing real-world political and economic structures to change. However, he simultaneously emphasizes that supporting stablecoins as tools does not equate to acknowledging them as the completed form of the crypto revolution.
He has previously compared stablecoins to the Tychonic system in the Copernican Revolution: the Tychonic system incorporated many technical advantages of the new astronomy and could explain more phenomena, making it more easily accepted by traditional authorities during the revolution. However, it rejected the most crucial point—it refused to let the Earth move. Stablecoins are similar. They inherit the clearing efficiency, programmability, global liquidity, and cross-border payment advantages of blockchain but refuse to remove the dollar from its central position.
Discussing Open USD, Hu Yilin further distinguishes between the 'moderate faction' and the 'royalists.' He says: "I think someone like Michael Saylor counts as the 'moderate faction.' He also seeks compatibility with the old system but holds onto the core revolutionary point of 'Bitcoin standard.'" In other words, the Saylor-style route can accept public companies, accounting standards, debt financing, capital markets, and regulatory frameworks, yet it still views Bitcoin as the new standard asset. It compromises with the old system without abandoning the revolutionary core that "the emperor can be replaced."
Stablecoins are different. Hu Yilin says: "Stablecoins certainly have historical significance but cannot be considered true revolutionaries." In his view, stablecoins are more like reformists within the old system, believing that "the emperor (the dollar, the Fed) is good, it's just that the execution system below is somewhat bloated and inefficient. The previous Eastern Depot didn't do a good job; now we rely on the Western Depot to improve things."
This metaphor sharply points out the inherent limitations of stablecoins: their opposition is not to the dollar's centrality but to the inefficiency of the old payment systems, bank clearing networks, cross-border transfer systems, and financial intermediation. They seek to replace the grassroots bureaucrats, not the supreme authority.
Therefore, when the crypto revolution could only touch 'execution systems' like banks, payment companies, SWIFT, Visa, and Alipay, stablecoins and more radical cryptocurrency routes appeared aligned in direction: they both opposed the expensive, slow, and opaque old financial system. But once the issue touches the dollar, U.S. Treasury bonds, the Federal Reserve, and the fiat currency standard, their divergence becomes apparent. Hu Yilin says stablecoins "from the very beginning, are preventing the revolution from going deeper." 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 Personally, What's Left for Stablecoin Entrepreneurs?
The peculiarity of Open USD lies in it not being a new coin launched by a single crypto startup team, but rather a consortium-style project involving payment companies, banks, technology platforms, asset managers, and public blockchain ecosystems. Open Standard officially emphasizes that it aims to give enterprises greater participation in stablecoin reserve earnings, governance, and large-scale usage.
This is precisely why Hu Yilin finds Open USD symbolically significant. In the past, a core narrative of dollar stablecoins was: traditional finance is too slow, too expensive, too closed-off, so crypto companies must use blockchain to enhance its efficiency. But now, traditional finance and payment giants are beginning to organize their own stablecoin networks. The old system is no longer merely the target of transformation but directly becomes 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 are stablecoins trying to revolutionize? SWIFT? What if banks start using stablecoins for settlements too? 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, even "retire after achieving its goal." But if these native stablecoin companies remain unwilling to be co-opted, they must re-explain their fundamental difference from the old system.
"If you still feel unwilling, you still have to return to the path of decentralization, abandon compromise, and continue the revolution," Hu Yilin says.
Here, 'drawing a clear line' doesn't necessarily take only one form. Hu Yilin doesn't demand all projects follow the Bitcoin route. One can insist on a coin standard, on decentralized governance, on censorship resistance, or on 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 unorthodox," he says.
This statement highlights the awkwardness of the stablecoin narrative: when a project builds its entire selling point on compliance, efficiency, low cost, institutional friendliness, and compatibility with the old financial system, it may ultimately 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 broader assessment: the more successful dollar stablecoins are, it does not necessarily mean the crypto sector is more successful; on the contrary, it may signify greater success for the dollar system.
If global cross-border e-commerce, migrant remittances, on-chain transactions, RWA, DeFi, and corporate settlements increasingly use dollar stablecoins, then what is weakened might be local banking systems, traditional cross-border payment networks, and some capital controls. However, what is strengthened remains the dollar denomination, U.S. Treasury reserves, and the American 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 dollar, the underlying earnings still come from reserve assets, and the governance structure involves a consortium of enterprises 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 long-term adversaries for 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 the dollar stablecoin, the collateral is U.S. Treasuries and RWA, the source of earnings is traditional financial assets, and users' value anchor is also the dollar, then the more prosperous on-chain activity becomes, it does not necessarily mean that ETH, SOL, or other underlying native chain tokens gain greater monetary premium. The on-chain world can prosper, but wealth accumulates in off-chain dollar assets, stablecoin issuers, and traditional financial earnings structures. As Hu Yilin previously stated, stablecoins cause the logic of "the more prosperous the on-chain world, the more the native token appreciates" to break, turning into "the more prosperous the on-chain world, the richer the off-chain world becomes."
It's Okay to 'Sell Fuel,' But Don't Demote Civilization-Level Narratives to Transaction Fee Narratives
The stablecoin issue also leads Hu Yilin to criticize Ethereum's 'oil' narrative once more. Many Ethereum supporters argue that even if on-chain activities primarily use USDT, USDC, or Open USD, transactions still require consuming ETH, DeFi activities still generate fees, and L2s still settle on the mainnet, therefore ETH will still benefit from on-chain prosperity.
Hu Yilin counters this: 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. "The price of gasoline cannot be infinite, because when gasoline becomes expensive enough, people have a stronger incentive to seek alternative energy sources," he says. Moreover, replacing Ethereum is far easier than replacing gasoline infrastructure. Changing cars from fuel to electric requires a new industry chain and product design, but migrating a DeFi protocol from Ethereum to a compatible public blockchain has a much lower technical barrier.
In his view, if Ethereum relies solely on fee revenue, it will encounter the valuation ceiling of infrastructure service providers. Exchanges, clearinghouses, and payment networks can be important, but their revenue scale is not equivalent to the monetary premium of a standard asset. Hu Yilin asks rhetorically: How much fee revenue does the NASDAQ exchange generate in a year? Do the net incomes of all global stock exchanges combined exceed that of a single company like Apple?
However, he does not believe all public blockchains must shoulder the same revolutionary mission. The ambitions of blockchains like Solana were never that grand; their positioning is closer to "being a strong competitor at the company level," such as becoming a high-performance alternative to Ethereum. Hu Yilin says if a project's "original positioning was to sell fuel, then of course it can accept this 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 notes, is that not all crypto assets can be satisfied with 'selling fuel.' Hu Yilin distinguishes three types of projects: first is Bitcoin, which aimed for monetary revolution from its inception; second is Ethereum, which wanted to be a "world computer" and a civilization-level innovation; third are many emerging small tokens, which lack traditional capital backing and must rely on grand narratives to attract attention and trust.
Therefore, the true divergence is not whether all tokens should promote revolution, but rather: any project aspiring for a higher ceiling cannot avoid the revolutionary narrative. You can choose to be just a block space service provider, just a high-performance chain, just a financial application platform. But if you claim you want to change the world, reorganize civilization's infrastructure, become the next generation of money or the next generation of the internet, then you cannot demote your native token's narrative to mere transaction fee fuel.
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 more concise 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 intellectual threshold. The true Copernican moment is not stablecoins making cross-border transfers cheaper, nor banks learning to settle on-chain, but market participants beginning to realize that economic life may not necessarily require a fixed central bank as the center of monetary order.
"The key is for people to emancipate their minds: the Earth can move. My grounded life does not depend on the Earth being stationary," Hu Yilin says. Translating to the currency issue, the core idea 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 should be are determined spontaneously by the market, by every specific, decentralized transaction, without needing a specific institution to decree it."
This is also the fundamental reason he insists on the Bitcoin standard and criticizes the stablecoin standard. Stablecoins can increase 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 denominates in dollars, uses U.S. Treasuries as underlying assets, and takes central bank currency 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. Yet, from the perspective of cryptocurrency's original ideals, it may also mark a successful co-option of blockchain technology by the old system.
Hu Yilin does not deny the historical significance of stablecoins. But historical significance does not equate to the completion of revolution. The Tychonic system was once popular precisely because it could accommodate new technology and old authority. However, what truly changed the world's picture was the new paradigm that allowed the Earth to move.
For the crypto world, the question is similarly so: If the dollar never moves, and the Federal Reserve remains forever at the center, then no matter how open and efficient stablecoins become, they are merely sophisticated instruments in the old universe. The true revolution awaits the market's belief that monetary order can rotate without that center.
