By: Forbes
Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
Open USD claims to solve all the pain points of stablecoin settlement. Even with over 150 partners at launch, can it really deliver?
The guest list for Open USD is more important than the coin itself. When a dollar token launches with a roster of over 140 partners, including the world's largest asset manager, two competing daily card networks, global custodian banks, the largest merchant software platform, and a slew of crypto firms, the coin itself becomes almost secondary. Every layer of the financial system has decided it needs a seat at the same table.
Founding partners like Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa, and BlackRock set the tone. The broader list paints the full picture: BNY Mellon, Standard Chartered, DBS, Bank of America, alongside Shopify, Google, IBM, Mercado Pago, Ripple, Aave, MetaMask, and Anchorage, with American Express and Discover also included. Reading the list by category reveals a clear map—who believes stablecoins will become important, and who is unwilling to let competitors dominate this lane alone.
Such a broad coalition is no accident. Each category on the list represents a different way to profit from, or be threatened by, dollars flowing on a blockchain. The organizers deliberately brought them together because a stablecoin's value lies in the breadth of its acceptance, and the fastest way to build that breadth is to make the places that accept it also the owners of the coin.
Why Are Asset Managers Joining?
First, it's worth focusing on BlackRock. A stablecoin's reserves are its economic engine, primarily invested in short-term Treasuries and money market instruments—precisely BlackRock's forte. From an asset manager's perspective, a large-scale dollar token is a massive, sticky cash pool requiring professional management. BlackRock already operates tokenized money market products adjacent to stablecoins. Joining Open USD places it inside the reserve business for a coin facing hundreds of partners, rather than competing from the outside to manage it.
This management role is no small prize. Proponents envision dollar coins of such scale that they would hold hundreds of billions in Treasuries and cash, a pool generating income daily. Whoever manages it gets to collect fees from the system's largest, most stable balances. BlackRock's choice to become a member rather than just a supplier suggests it expects Open USD to be large enough to warrant securing the reserve business by holding a stake in the coin.
Why Are Merchants and Banks Joining?
Shopify is focused on the other end of the money flow—the checkout. Merchants pay interchange fees on card payments and earn no yield on their working balances. A coin that settles instantly, has lower acceptance costs, and, in the Open USD model, returns reserve yield to merchants, solves two problems at once. For a platform with millions of merchants, a stablecoin that lowers acceptance costs and generates reserve income from idle balances directly boosts profit margins.
Banks are the most telling participants because they face the greatest risk. BNY Mellon, Standard Chartered, DBS, and Bank of America all profit from holding deposits and facilitating cross-border transfers—both threatened by stablecoins. Their calculation is defensive: if tokenized dollars will siphon balances away from accounts, it's better to sit inside the coalition issuing the token, retain custody and settlement business, and share in reserve income, rather than watch deposits flow to a coin they have no stake in.
This hedge comes with another layer. The largest US banks are separately building a shared tokenized deposit network to prevent mass outflows from the banking system. Appearing on the Open USD list simultaneously indicates they are uncertain which model will win and are thus buying insurance by betting on both paths.
The Role of Tech and Crypto Camps
The tech company names point not just to current uses but future scenarios. Google and IBM are neither merchants nor banks; they are building the infrastructure for agent-driven commerce—software that automatically makes purchases on behalf of users. Machine payments require programmable, rule-defined dollars, and a coin governed by an open coalition is easier to build on than one controlled by a single competitor. Their participation indicates a bet: the coin used for machine-to-machine payment settlement should not be monopolized by any one company.
Crypto members provide what banks and merchants cannot. Ripple brings cross-border liquidity, Aave offers lending markets, MetaMask owns tens of millions of user wallets, and Anchorage provides the compliant custody regulated institutions need to touch tokens. For Open USD, they transform a paper coin into one that can actually be used, traded, and settled from day one. For crypto firms, sitting in a coalition with BlackRock and Visa is the path to mainstream legitimacy they've chased for a decade.
Mercado Pago's inclusion points south. In Latin America, dollar stablecoins are already savings and settlement tools for individuals and businesses hedging against local currencies, and Mercado Pago is at the center of that regional demand. A member that can push Open USD to tens of millions of Latin American users gives the coin something its US founders cannot: immediate, real-world relevance in markets where stablecoins are not a convenience but a necessity.
Competitors Sitting in the Same Room
The strangest part of the list is how many members are competitors. Visa and Mastercard operate rival networks; American Express and Discover are two more; Coinbase and Ripple have been on opposing sides of crypto legal and cultural battles for years; Solana and Polygon are competing blockchains. That these companies collectively back the same coin shows that the fear of being locked out of stablecoin infrastructure now outweighs the instinct to build a proprietary version alone. The logic mirrors the birth of shared card networks decades ago: no single player could build widespread acceptance alone, so they built it together and then competed on top.
The card networks' position is the most contradictory and revealing. Visa and Mastercard profit from the swipe-fee rails that a cheap stablecoin could directly undermine, yet both are founding members. Their bet is: since money is moving on-chain regardless, it's better to sell services like tokenization, settlement, and fraud prevention on the new rails, thus staying in the money flow, than to cling to the old ones. Joining the coin that threatens them is precisely how they stay relevant.
This is also the coalition's weakness. A coin governed by rivals will move slowly. The shared governance that makes Open USD attractive to members also makes decisions harder to reach. How are fees set? How is reserve income distributed? Which chains does it run on? Who bears losses? Every choice pits members against each other, and the co-founding card networks each have their own stablecoin ambitions. The coalition holds only as long as joining is better than going it alone.
What This List Tells You
Beyond individual names, the overall pattern is the message. Asset managers want the reserves, merchants want the checkout, banks want to keep deposits, crypto firms want distribution, card networks want to guard the tollbooth, and Big Tech wants a seat in the payment flows of an agent-driven internet. They all look at stablecoins and reach the same conclusion: this is becoming shared financial infrastructure, and the cost of being locked out is higher than the discomfort of sharing with rivals.
For Circle and Tether, this list is the real threat. They built the best independent dollar tokens, and "independent" is precisely what Open USD members have decided they no longer want. After the announcement, Circle's stock fell over 17% not because Open USD's tech is superior, but because the announcement represented the very clients Circle needs to win over collectively moving to the other side.
Absences are as telling as presences. Circle and Tether aren't on the list because the coalition was built to bypass them; the largest US retail banks are absent, busy building their own tokenized deposit network rather than backing a stablecoin. This list is a self-selected group—those firms that have decided a shared stablecoin is better than a proprietary one or none at all.
The coin may take a year to formally launch, and it may stumble on its interesting governance. But the guest list has already given the direction: stablecoins have graduated from a product sold by one company to infrastructure owned by an entire industry, and the earliest to see this have ensured they won't have to rent it from someone else.
