On June 30, more than 140 companies unveiled Open USD, a stablecoin backed by names including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Google, and Coinbase, one of Circle’s most important partners. Investors reacted fast. Circle shares fell as much as 18% intraday and closed down 17.55% at $62.63, leaving the stock down nearly 40% for the month.
The selloff was tied to one issue above all others: Circle’s dependence on reserve income from USDC. The report says USDC circulation stands around $73 billion. Circle invests the backing reserves in short-term U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents, and at current rates that float produces billions of dollars a year, accounting for roughly 96% of company revenue. That leaves the business highly exposed if partners decide they want a share of the economics tied to the balances they help create.
Open USD redirects reserve income to members
That is the point of Open USD. The new stablecoin is issued by independent operator Open Standard and is built around free minting and redemption, shared governance, and reserve income distributed back to participating members after a management fee. In practical terms, the structure turns distributors, payment firms, exchanges, custodians, and merchants from customers of a stablecoin issuer into beneficiaries of the underlying reserve yield.
The backing list spans multiple sectors. Payments companies include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and Stripe. Financial names include BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, BBVA, Mizuho, U.S. Bank, and DBS. The technology group includes Google, Samsung, IBM, and Shopify. Crypto participants include Coinbase, Ripple, OKX, Bybit, Gemini, Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, MetaMask, Aave, Solana Labs, and Polygon.
Circle’s partnership moat faces pressure from inside
Circle has already been paying heavily for distribution. According to the report, the company paid Coinbase $908 million in one recent year as a distribution fee for supporting USDC. Open USD extends that logic much more broadly. Instead of negotiating yield-sharing with a single large partner, the consortium model makes shared economics part of the default design.
That helps explain the severity of the market reaction. Circle’s valuation has become tightly linked to whether it can keep the reserve income generated by USDC. The article notes that Wall Street’s consensus price target for Circle is close to $120, about 91% above the post-drop trading level. The gap reflects a timing debate as much as a factual one: analysts are valuing the years it may take OUSD to launch fully and scale, while the market is repricing Circle’s strategic position now.
OUSD is aimed at enterprise treasury and merchant payments
Open USD is not framed as a retail product first. It is led by Zach Abrams through Open Standard. Abrams previously founded stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, which Stripe acquired in 2024. Stripe has committed to making OUSD the base stablecoin across its commerce ecosystem. The token is scheduled to launch natively on Solana later this year, with support across wallets, lending, custody, and merchant channels through members such as MetaMask, Aave, Fireblocks, Anchorage, Shopify, and Mercado Pago.
The target market is enterprise treasury and merchant payments, the same areas where stablecoin usage has been growing quickly. The report links that shift to the 2025 passage of the GENIUS Act, which defined the framework for compliant dollar stablecoins in the United States. Once the legal structure became clearer, the strategic question changed. Large institutions no longer had to ask whether they could participate. They could ask why they should leave reserve income with a third-party issuer.
Circle still has defenses in regulation, liquidity, and trust
The article does not present Open USD as an instant replacement for USDC. Circle still holds meaningful advantages in regulatory standing, liquidity depth, and market trust. In Europe, MiCA has already reshaped which stablecoins can circulate in the bloc, and Circle’s EU authorization is described as a real asset. At the same time, Tether’s USDT remains dominant in offshore exchange liquidity, emerging-market dollar demand, and informal settlement flows, which leaves Open USD focused more directly on Circle’s core regulated market.
USDC also retains a strong position in DeFi. It has been embedded for years in lending markets, deep trading pairs, and collateral frameworks, and changing a default settlement asset inside major protocols is not simple. Even so, Open USD’s supporter list includes Aave, MetaMask, Solana Labs, and Polygon, showing that the challenge reaches into the infrastructure layer of crypto. For Circle, the threat is not only a one-day stock drop. It is the possibility that major partners are reorganizing around a new way to split stablecoin economics.