Bitget Wallet researcher Lacie Zhang says Open USD has pushed a structural problem in the stablecoin business into plain view. On June 30, 2026, Open Standard unveiled Open USD, or OUSD, with more than 140 participating companies including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Ripple, Google, and Shopify. The new stablecoin was introduced with zero minting and redemption fees, no issuance cap, and a model that returns nearly all reserve income, after a management fee, to distribution partners.
The market response was swift. Circle shares on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker CRCL fell about 16% that day, wiping out roughly $3.6 billion in market value. In Zhang’s reading, that reaction was less about a token that had not officially launched yet and more about what its design said about where value in stablecoins may actually sit.
The core question behind the selloff
Stablecoins are often described as a legal money-printing machine. A user deposits $1, the issuer mints a token pegged to $1, and the issuer places the cash into short-dated U.S. Treasuries or similar safe assets to earn 4% to 5% yield. The holder gets no interest. The issuer keeps the reserve income.
Zhang writes that the idea is old even if the wrapper is new. It resembles seigniorage, the extra economic benefit tied to money issuance. She also points to the U.S. GENIUS Act, passed in 2025, which explicitly barred issuers of payment stablecoins from paying interest to token holders, reinforcing the basic economics of the model.
Yet the business is not nearly as profitable as the headline logic suggests. According to the article, Circle posted $1.68 billion in revenue in 2024 while its net margin was only about 9%, and Wall Street’s consensus for 2026 was around 7%. A business that appears to generate income almost automatically still ends up with single-digit profitability.
Zhang argues the missing piece is distribution. Stablecoins need users, and users are reached through platforms that control entry points, payment flows, and transaction venues. The issuer may generate reserve yield, but the channel often holds the bargaining power.
Circle is used as the clearest example because of the amount of public disclosure available. Zhang describes Circle’s model as a spread business not unlike a bank’s net interest margin. Users swap dollars for USDC, Circle invests reserves in short-term Treasuries and similar assets, and the difference becomes income. In 2025, Circle generated about $2.75 billion in revenue, and reserve interest income in the fourth quarter alone came to $733 million, more than 95% of total revenue for the period discussed in the article.
But much of that economics did not stay with Circle. Citing Circle’s prospectus and financial statements, the article says Coinbase takes 100% of reserve income generated by USDC held on its own platform, while reserve income generated off-platform is split 50-50. In 2024 alone, Circle paid Coinbase $908 million in distribution fees, or about 54% of Circle’s total revenue. Put differently, more than half of every dollar Circle earned was passed through to its largest distribution partner.
Zhang’s point is straightforward. Coinbase does not issue USDC and does not bear reserve management, redemption, or compliance obligations, yet it captures a large share of the economics by controlling a major user entry point and transaction venue. The article adds that Circle cannot unilaterally terminate the agreement and that it renews automatically on a three-year cycle.
That is why reserve income, while booked by the issuer, increasingly looks like a toll paid to distribution. The issuer handles compliance, reserves, redemptions, and regulation-heavy operations. The channel captures a large part of the profit pool.
Why Tether looks completely different
Zhang then addresses the obvious counterpoint. If issuer bargaining power is so weak, why did Tether generate more than $10 billion in net profit in 2025 and rank among the world’s most profitable companies on a per-employee basis?
Her answer is that Circle and Tether may both issue dollar-denominated stablecoins, but they serve different demand structures. Tether’s USDT, with supply above $185 billion according to the article, is used heavily in emerging markets such as Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, and parts of Southeast Asia where inflation is high, foreign exchange controls exist, or banking systems are weaker. In those markets, USDT is not just a crypto trading quote asset. It functions more like digital dollar cash.
Consumers want dollars. Merchants want settlement tools. Small and medium-sized businesses want cross-border payment rails. In that setting, Zhang says USDT becomes an easy-to-obtain, easy-to-circulate substitute. Tether therefore does not need to pay a dominant distribution gatekeeper in the same way and can keep a larger portion of reserve income. The article says that allowed the company to accumulate more than $120 billion in U.S. Treasuries, $17 billion in gold, and $8 billion in Bitcoin.
Circle’s USDC, by contrast, sits in a different market. Zhang describes it as the world of U.S. compliance, institutional usage, and exchange adoption. It is a more expensive market to serve, but one that creates a different moat. In her framing, USDC has become the leading compliant dollar stablecoin globally and has built trust in institutional, exchange, and regulation-friendly use cases that USDT has struggled to replicate.
That contrast leads to one of the article’s central claims: Tether is collecting seigniorage, while Circle is paying rent to channels. The difference is not simply who issues the token. It is who controls demand and the sticky distribution environment around it.
What OUSD is trying to do
Seen through that lens, OUSD looks less radical than it first appears. Zhang says Open USD gives away what traditional issuers would normally try to keep: reserve yield. Some describe the setup as a stablecoin version of a Treasury cashback model. Bring transaction volume, bring balances, and you share in the interest generated by reserves.
Her argument is that if reserve income will leak to distribution anyway, OUSD is making that transfer explicit from day one. It does not treat reserve income as issuer profit. It treats it as a budget to buy distribution.
That matters for platforms such as Stripe, Shopify, and Visa, which control merchant networks, payment flows, and settlement entry points. Technical integration is not the scarce thing, the article says. The scarce asset is default placement: which asset a platform recommends at settlement, which stablecoin sits as the default merchant balance, and which standard a cross-border payment path uses first.
Under the old logic, a platform compared stablecoins mainly on compliance, liquidity, and settlement efficiency. OUSD adds another direct question: if a platform routes traffic and balances into one asset rather than another, which issuer or network shares reserve economics back with it?
Zhang says Circle may neither want nor need to match that model. Circle still needs reserve income to support its income statement and long-term investment, and it remains bound by its revenue-sharing arrangement with Coinbase. OUSD may be able to widen distribution by giving up nearly all reserve yield, but that also raises a basic issue: if the issuer keeps very little profit, who funds compliance, liquidity, market making, global expansion, audits, and ecosystem development over time?
Open USD presents itself as a foundational currency layer for the internet economy, aimed at enterprise payments and cross-border remittances. Zhang says its ambition is not simply to add another stablecoin to the market but to become a base settlement standard behind stablecoin flows. Still, she stresses that standards are not created by white papers. They are created by transaction volume.
One detail she highlights is the role of Zach Abrams, Open Standard’s interim chief executive officer and also a co-founder of Bridge. Stripe acquired Bridge in 2024 for $1.1 billion. Bridge already had an Open Issuance product built to help companies issue stablecoins and share reserve income. Zhang describes OUSD as that logic scaled up: instead of launching a separate coin for every company, it asks all participants to operate around a single reserve-sharing and settlement framework.
That, in her view, is why Stripe matters so much. The power of OUSD would not come from a list of 140 names by itself. It would come from whether a high-frequency payment entry point can funnel real merchants, real transactions, and real balances into the system.
A three-layer reading of the stablecoin stack
The article breaks the stablecoin industry into three layers.
- Reserve layer: the surface-level seigniorage. It looks like the obvious profit source, but it is hard to retain when distribution partners demand a share.
- Distribution layer: the companies that control user entry points, transaction contexts, and sticky balances can reallocate reserve economics. Zhang points to Circle and Coinbase as the clearest current example.
- Network layer: the settlement rules, asset standards, and interoperability framework. At this layer, competition is no longer just about a single coin. It is about who becomes the shared standard across payment platforms, merchant networks, and financial applications.
In this framework, Circle sits firmly in the reserve layer, is deeply tied to Coinbase in the distribution layer, and is also reaching upward through products such as Circle Payments Network, or CPN, and its Arc chain. Open USD, by contrast, is giving up economics at the first layer to pull in distributors and network participants higher up the stack.
Zhang is careful not to overstate the current position. As of publication, OUSD had not officially launched. The 140-company list may show interest from payment and financial firms in a new settlement network, but it does not yet prove that OUSD has achieved real network effects.
The gap between a partner list and actual adoption
The article says network effects remain the hardest obstacle for any new stablecoin. Broader distribution and a new settlement standard cannot be declared into existence. They have to be built through real transaction volume, real balances, and real usage.
Zhang points to the post-USDT and post-USDC record. New stablecoins that have reached meaningful scale are rare. PayPal’s PYUSD has a market capitalization of about $2.7 billion, while the alliance-backed USDG led by Paxos reached about $3 billion after three years of operation. Both remain one to two orders of magnitude smaller than USDT and USDC, which operate at well above $100 billion scale.
That is why she says the real moat in stablecoins is not who issues them. It is liquidity and usage habit. A partner announcement cannot replace either one quickly.
For OUSD, the next challenge is depth of adoption. Adding an “OUSD” option inside a settlement system is one thing. Making OUSD the default settlement asset and routing merchant balances and payment flow into it is something else. Governance of the alliance and whether partners carry any actual commitment will shape how much the open consortium is worth in practice.
Sustainability is another open issue. Giving away almost all reserve income may attract distributors, but it leaves little profit at the issuer level. Over the long term, compliance, audits, market making, liquidity provision, international expansion, and ecosystem integration all require ongoing spending.
Migration costs are also real. If members are expected to shift existing payment, settlement, and treasury workflows onto a new stablecoin, the move touches finance, risk management, compliance, technical integration, and user behavior. That kind of transition takes time.
Zhang’s conclusion here is narrow but important. OUSD may represent a repricing of how reserve income should be allocated across the stablecoin stack. It does not yet represent a completed replacement of existing market leaders, and it does not mean on-chain dollars will naturally converge into a single asset.
The bigger fight is over how dollars move
For Zhang, the 140-plus participants are not mainly chasing a slice of reserve yield. They are trying to secure a place in the next generation of financial settlement infrastructure.
She lists a series of adjacent moves. JPMorgan has introduced the deposit token JPMD. PayPal launched PYUSD. Apple, Google, and Walmart are studying stablecoin integration. The Wall Street Journal has also reported that JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo plan to launch a joint tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House in the first half of 2027.
The common target, according to the article, is not Treasury yield. It is three lower-level advantages: bypassing old settlement rails, controlling accounts and data, and participating in the rule-setting process for next-generation payments. For payment firms and banks, stablecoins are less a new line of business than a ticket onto the field.
Cross-border remittances that once moved through correspondent banking networks over two or three days, with fees layered in at each step, can be compressed into seconds at close to zero cost with stablecoins. That directly challenges payment fees, foreign exchange spreads, and other established income streams.
Yet broad participation creates another problem. There are now too many on-chain dollars. The article names USDT, USDC, OUSD, PYUSD, USDG, JPMD, and possible future bank-issued tokenized deposits. Each competes for its own use cases, and each may exist on multiple blockchains such as Solana, Base, Polygon, and Ethereum.
One nominal dollar is fractured into dozens of tokens spread across chains, accounts, and liquidity pools. For ordinary users and businesses, that turns into a simple operational question: which dollar should I hold, and can I pay someone who accepts a different one?
Zhang argues that this is where the next scarce layer emerges. It may not be issuance. It may not even be a single distribution channel. It may be the liquidity layer that makes different dollars interchangeable, usable, routable, and settleable across systems.
Bitget Wallet’s “dollar account” thesis
This is the point where the article moves from OUSD specifically to a broader product direction. The more stablecoins exist, the worse fragmentation becomes. The worse fragmentation becomes, the more users need an account layer that hides the complexity in the background.
Zhang compares it to consumer payments today. People using WeChat Pay or Alipay do not usually care which bank sits behind a balance. In the same way, users of on-chain dollars should not have to keep track of whether they hold USDT, USDC, OUSD, or a wrapped version on a specific chain.
That makes wallets and account products unusually important. A wallet that can hold, swap, route, and settle multiple dollar-denominated assets can collapse issuer fragmentation back into what feels like a single dollar from the user’s point of view. Fragmentation is a war for issuers, but it can be an opportunity for the account layer.
Zhang says the winner at that layer may be the product that can pull together dollars scattered across chains, stablecoins, and liquidity pools while reducing slippage, gas volatility, and routing costs through the conversion and settlement process.
Following that view, Bitget Wallet is exploring what it calls a “dollar account” product direction. The idea is to let users hold and use dollars across chains and across token types inside a self-custodied account, without needing to manage which stablecoin sits underneath.
As one of the members of Open Standard, Bitget Wallet says the long-term question it is watching is not only whether OUSD becomes the next mainstream stablecoin. It is whether the issuer’s name matters less over time, and if so, which product becomes the default account through which users enter the on-chain dollar economy.
From issuance to networks and accounts
Zhang ends with a broader shift in perspective. For the past decade, the main stablecoin story was about who could move dollars on-chain in a legal and credible way. Once more than 140 companies are willing to reorganize reserve economics around a common framework, that story starts to change.
Issuing digital dollars, in her framing, is no longer a business that necessarily allows one company to keep the most attractive economics for itself. It is more like an entry pass into the next generation of financial settlement networks. The real value may not remain on issuer balance sheets.
The new battle is over how dollars move, how they settle, and how they are presented to users. Whoever defines the standard, controls the settlement path, and can reassemble fragmented dollars across chains, stablecoins, and liquidity pools into what users experience as one dollar may end up closest to the next financial entry point.