Author: Eric, Foresight News
On the evening of June 30th Beijing time, the emergence of a new stablecoin once again stirred up the stablecoin landscape.
A company called Open Standard announced that it would launch the stablecoin Open USD. Features like free minting and redemption, sharing of reserve asset yields, and partner co-governance directly address the pain points in stablecoin distribution and seem very attractive.
What most surprised the market was that Open Standard had already "secured" over 140 partners before the stablecoin's launch.
This list includes companies that have already issued stablecoins, such as Western Union, Ripple, MetaMask, and Aave. The fact that it gathered signatures from so many giants in both Web3 and traditional finance before launch surprised the market and filled it with anticipation for Open USD's future development. The most telling reflection of this anticipation was the performance of stablecoin leader Circle's stock, which plummeted 17.55% that day, leaving it less than 20% away from a new low.
However, this explosive announcement was quickly debunked.
On July 3rd, according to a report by *The Chosun Ilbo*, companies including Samsung Electronics, Dunamu (parent company of Upbit), Shinhan Financial Group, and K Bank stated that they had never negotiated matters related to Open USD (OUSD). A Samsung Electronics representative said, "There has been no formal negotiation, and we don't know what role (in the alliance) we are supposed to undertake." Shinhan Financial Holdings, Dunamu, and K Bank also stated that while Open Standard had inquired about their willingness to participate in OUSD, and they had only responded that they "would consider it briefly," their names were listed as alliance members.
Tony Chung, BD Director at the Korean Web3 media outlet Blockmedia, added that a representative from one of the Korean companies said they learned about being on the list from Korean media reports and were very confused, as they had only casually replied at the time, "We'll consider it if feasible."
Gabor Gurbacs, Founder & CEO of OpenAssets, reposted Tony Chung's tweet and noted that not only Korean companies were misled. After contacting some of OpenAssets' clients on the list, Gabor Gurbacs received responses stating: "They said they never signed or agreed to anything. Either the media grossly distorted the facts, or the list of participants is misleading."
From this perspective, Open Standard's "list of a hundred" likely included some companies they had merely contacted. In the original announcement, Open Standard's wording was: "Businesses across industries have signed up to use Open USD." Perhaps in Open Standard's view, not explicitly refusing meant "agreeing" to use Open USD, but agreeing to use does not necessarily mean "must use."
This is a very typical marketing tactic of trading controversy for attention, which indeed had some effect, albeit with a flavor of rubbing business ethics on the ground.
Faced with such aggressive tactics and an "unruly" opponent, Jeremy Allaire, Co-founder & CEO of Circle, published a long post on X questioning the "three major features" of Open USD:
Free Minting and Burning: Appealing in the short term but potentially unsustainable at scale, leading to insufficient funds for maintaining banking relationships, regulatory licenses, and technical infrastructure. Circle already offers favorable terms to major partners via contracts, not blanket free services.
Sharing Almost All Yields with Partners: Could "starve" the infrastructure, leading to systemic underinvestment and limiting the platform's scale. Circle already shares most of its revenue with distribution partners.
Alliance/Multi-Company Governance: Circle previously co-founded the Centre Consortium with Coinbase, later integrated into Circle for sole issuance. He believes the historical record of multi-company products scaling up is "very poor" (slow coordination, difficult decision-making).
Jeremy still expressed a welcoming attitude toward OUSD joining the "stablecoin family," but between the lines, his post conveyed one point: the stablecoin business is one where winners take all through accumulated time, and simply modifying a few mechanisms is not enough to "sit at the table."
Besides these negative controversies, some companies on the list have explicitly stated they will support Open USD's development. Stripe stated it would set OUSD as the default stablecoin for businesses using stablecoins on Stripe; Coinbase also said it would integrate OUSD into Base and other chains, planning to launch in late 2026 for expanding on-chain transactions, payments, and DeFi scenarios.
Payment network giants like Visa and Mastercard, financial institutions like BlackRock and Bank of New York Mellon, as well as crypto-native projects like Aave, Solana, and Ripple have also expressed support, though no specific cooperation methods have been clarified yet.
According to the announcement, the founding CEO of Open Standard is the CEO of Bridge. This Bridge is the fiat on/off-ramp solution provider that previously partnered with multiple contenders in the Hyperliquid native stablecoin USDH issuance rights dispute but caused controversy when it was acquired by Stripe, which is developing the stablecoin chain Tempo. Stripe was among the first to clarify its partnership after Open Standard's announcement, so there is likely a relatively close connection between the two.
A user named Bojan on X suggested that Open Standard's promotion is a typical case of "legitimacy-borrowing"—borrowing the reputation or endorsement of other well-known, credible entities to quickly boost its own legitimacy and credibility, without having actually obtained deep endorsement or formal authorization from them. For the stablecoin track, where trust is foundational, OUSD seems to have left a somewhat negative first impression even before its debut.
