How the Visa, Stripe and Mastercard USD Token Would Work
What the alliance built
Previously, we discussed the potential opportunities and challenges with OUSD. This piece goes one level deeper. The card networks did not fight stablecoins; they co-issued one. Open USD (ticker OUSD) is a dollar stablecoin run by an independent company called Open Standard, with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and Shopify as founding partners. It was announced on June 30, 2026, with more than 140 partners, and went live for businesses on September 30, 2026 (Blockhead).
The pitch rests on three promises. Businesses can mint and redeem at a 1:1 dollar rate with no fee and no volume cap. Nearly all reserve income flows to partners, minus a small management fee, instead of to a single issuer. And governance sits with a partner-elected board rather than one company.
That is a direct challenge to the incumbents. USDT and USDC hold close to 90% of the stablecoin supply (Blockhead), and their issuers keep the float. OUSD is a bet that the companies controlling distribution, not the companies minting tokens, should own the economics.
Allium via Stablecoin Insider (2024–2025) and ChainCatcher (Jan–Sep 2026); Jan–Sep 2025 derived
The timing matters because usage is outrunning supply. Allium counted $482 billion of payments in the first nine months of 2026, while circulating supply stood at $304.9 billion, just 0.4% above its December level. Full-year figures come from Allium’s February 2026 report. These are modeled estimates built from wallet classifications, not verified invoices.
This article walks through who OUSD is for, how a dollar moves through it, and what the money looks like. Where figures are not public, they are marked as illustrative.
Principal use cases
OUSD is built for business-to-business money movement, not retail speculation. Open Standard names banking, cross-border payments, settlement, and institutional trading as its targets (Blockhead). Five uses stand out.
Network settlement. Visa and Mastercard settle with issuers and acquirers daily. Visa's stablecoin settlement program already runs across nine blockchains at a $7 billion annualized rate. A shared token lets that settlement run 24/7, weekends included, without each network depending on a rival's coin.
Why it matters: Settlement moves from batched, business-day windows to near-instant finality around the clock, so banks need to pre-fund less cash to cover weekends and holidays.
Cross-border payouts and payroll. Marketplaces paying sellers, creators or contractors abroad can send dollars that arrive in seconds. Tempo, the Stripe-incubated chain that carries OUSD, reports partners testing remittance corridors that settle in seconds.
Why it matters: Payments that hop through several correspondent banks over days can arrive in seconds, so workers get paid faster and platforms hold less money in transit.
Merchant acceptance and treasury. Stripe made OUSD on Tempo its default stablecoin configuration, usable across its payments, treasury, payouts and card products. A merchant can hold OUSD as working capital and redeem only when it needs fiat.
Why it matters: Merchants avoid a currency conversion on every sale and convert to fiat only when they choose, at no redemption cost.
Stablecoin-linked cards. Bridge and Visa already enable stablecoin-based card payments. A cardholder spends from an OUSD balance; the merchant still receives local currency through normal card rails.
Why it matters: Stablecoin balances become spendable anywhere cards are accepted, with no change at the merchant's checkout.
Agentic and machine payments. Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol supports pay-per-call APIs and monetized MCP servers, and can aggregate thousands of small transactions into one settlement. AI agents paying for compute and data need a dollar that settles cheaply at sub-cent sizes.
Why it matters: Fixed per-transaction card fees make a one-cent purchase uneconomic; sub-cent settlement makes true pay-per-use pricing viable for software agents.
The common thread is that each use case still ends in the traditional system. Payouts land in bank accounts, card spend lands at acquirers, and treasury eventually redeems to dollars. OUSD is a bridge between rails, not a replacement for them.
How it works: the architecture flow
OUSD splits three jobs that a single issuer like Circle performs alone. Bridge, a Stripe subsidiary, mints, burns, and holds the reserves; Open Standard, governed by a partner-elected board, operates the network (Bridge). Businesses connect through four integration paths run by Stripe, Mastercard's BVNK, the Visa Stablecoin Platform, and Coinbase, each offering APIs for settlement, orchestration, trading, FX, wallets, and cards (Blockhead).
OUSD money flow · 6 steps plus the reserve income loop
A dollar travels the top row and back along the middle; the float it leaves behind pays out along the bottom.
Mint. A business sends dollars through a partner, and Bridge mints OUSD at 1:1 with no cost. The token is native on Ethereum, Base, Solana and Tempo, so there is no original with bridged copies.
Transfer. On Tempo, blocks finalize in about 0.6 seconds and fees are paid in dollar stablecoins, with no volatile gas token. That matters for treasurers, who can budget fees in dollars.
Use or hold. The recipient can keep OUSD as working capital, pay it onward, or spend it on a stablecoin-linked card.
Redeem. Any holder with partner access burns OUSD for dollars at par, again with no fee.
Reserve loop. Every dollar minted sits in Treasuries, repo, money funds or cash. The income flows to Open Standard, which keeps its fee and passes the rest to partners. Reserves are attested monthly.
The design choice that matters most is that minting is free. Incumbent issuers make mint and redeem prohibitively expensive at larger volumes, according to Open Standard. Removing that cost makes OUSD usable as a settlement pipe that businesses fill and drain daily.
Unit economics
OUSD makes money on the float, not on mint and redeem fees. Three layers matter, and the two key rates (the management fee and the per-transaction toll) have not been published, so the figures below are projections.
Layer 1: reserve income. Reserves sit in short-dated Treasuries, overnight Treasury repo, money market funds and cash at BNY, BlackRock and Lead Bank (Bridge).
Bridge reported about $668.5 million of OUSD outstanding on October 2, 2026. One analysis models a 3.5% reserve return and a 20 basis point fee, which on $1 billion yields about $35 million, with roughly $2 million to Open Standard. The table extends that model.
Illustrative projection: 3.5% gross reserve yield, 20 bps management fee. Neither rate is confirmed by Open Standard.
Layer 2: the partner's share. How the pool is divided among partners has not been disclosed. For illustration only, assume a pro-rata split by balances held. A platform keeping an average $100 million in OUSD would then earn about $3.3 million a year.
Ordinary holders get nothing: the GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying yield solely for holding a stablecoin, which is why income routes to distributing businesses instead.
Layer 3: the transaction. Take an illustrative $10,000 payment from a US platform to a supplier wallet. Minting and redemption cost nothing (Startupik). Tempo charges sub-cent network fees. Open Standard collects a small per-transaction toll whose rate is unpublished; at an assumed 1 basis point, that is $1. All-in cost: roughly $1, settled in under a second.
For comparison, Stripe's existing stablecoin acceptance settles to local currency for a 1.5% fee, or $150 on the same payment. That gap is the commercial argument. It also shows where fees will migrate: from the token itself to the services wrapped around it, such as FX, compliance, orchestration, and off-ramps.
Who wins. Stripe sits on several sides at once, as founding partner, integration path, and owner of the issuer (Blockhead). Visa and Mastercard keep settlement on a coin they co-govern. Circle and Tether face pressure to share float.
Open questions and what comes next
OUSD's model is clear in direction but thin on disclosed numbers. Four questions will decide whether the economics above hold.
The fee schedule. The management fee is described only as "small," and the network transaction fee as low and predictable with no published number. Every margin in this article moves with those two rates.
The issuer's charter. Bridge holds conditional OCC approval for a national trust bank, but that bank is not yet the issuer; today OUSD is issued by Bridge Building Inc., a registered money transmitter.
Rate sensitivity. The whole partner pool scales with short-term Treasury yields. If rates fall by one percentage point, the illustrative $10 billion pool shrinks by roughly $100 million a year.
Neutrality. A coin whose issuer is owned by one founding partner must convince the other 140-plus that governance is genuinely shared.
A familiar playbook
OUSD has a precedent, and it is the card networks themselves. Bank of America launched BankAmericard in 1958 and licensed it to other banks (Visa). In 1970, it handed control to the issuing banks, which formed National BankAmericard Inc., a nonstock, member-owned company renamed Visa in 1976. Rival banks did the same: the Interbank Card Association launched a national network in 1966 and bought the Master Charge brand in 1969, the forerunner of Mastercard.
The logic matches OUSD's. No single bank could build national acceptance alone, so competitors pooled one issuing and settlement network and shared its economics. That coalition grew to more than 20,000 member institutions before Visa went public in 2008. Open Standard repeats the move one layer down: partners share a token instead of card rails, co-govern it through an elected board, and split reserve income instead of interchange.
The history carries a warning too. Member-owned networks drew criticism for setting fees that benefited their owners, a conflict that persists today, and they consolidated into two dominant brands. A shared token governed by today's largest payment companies could follow the same arc, from open coalition to entrenched toll-taker.
The larger lesson is the one payment veterans keep repeating: new rails only work when they connect to the old ones. OUSD's value comes from Visa's settlement relationships, Mastercard's BVNK ramps, Stripe's merchant base, and BlackRock and BNY's custody. The token is the easy part. The Web2 plumbing that turns it into a usable dollar is the moat.
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