Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard Launch Open USD Stablecoin

Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-pegged stablecoin, has gone live for business payments, marking a significant milestone in the development of shared stablecoin infrastructure. The launch was announced on September 30, 2026, and has been made possible by the consortium of more than 200 financial institutions and technology companies, including Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard, which have collectively committed over $1 billion in seed liquidity.

OUSD is issued by Bridge, Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure subsidiary, and is governed by the independent Open Standard consortium. The stablecoin is now available for businesses to integrate through Stripe, Mastercard, and the Visa Stablecoin Platform, with Coinbase access scheduled to open today. The launch marks a significant departure from existing stablecoins, which have often prioritized the interests of the issuer over those of businesses and users.

Open Standard's revenue-sharing model is designed to incentivize partner companies to contribute to the growth of the network, rather than competing with each other for a fixed pool of users. This model has been compared to the structure of the Visa and Mastercard payment networks, which were originally organized as bank cooperatives that redistributed interchange revenue to member banks in proportion to their transaction volume.

However, European businesses face a limitation at launch, as OUSD is not registered as an e-money token (EMT) in the EU's MiCA register. This means that EU-regulated trading venues cannot legally list OUSD to European customers without the token's MiCA notification, and European businesses cannot access it through EU-regulated exchanges at launch.