Open USD, backed by Visa and Mastercard, is set to launch on Ethereum

The stablecoin war has a new front, and Ethereum is part of it.

Open USD (OUSD), the institution-focused stablecoin built by the Open Standard consortium, is set to launch on Ethereum from day one, according to U.Today, citing Ethereum Institutional. A July 13 CoinShares report instead said Solana and Tempo will issue OUSD natively on day one, so it is not established that Ethereum comes first. The token is expected to go live later this year. Behind the consortium stand more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY and Coinbase.

A direct challenge to Tether and Circle

The design reads like a point-by-point answer to how today’s stablecoin giants operate:

• No single issuer, in contrast to the one-company model behind USDT and USDC
• Consortium governance across the 140-plus members
• Fee-free minting and redemption
• Reserve earnings distributed to ecosystem partners instead of accumulating on one company’s balance sheet

That last point targets the heart of the incumbent business model. Reserve interest is what makes today’s stablecoin issuers so profitable. A consortium that redistributes those earnings to its partners is competing on structure, not just on features.

Why the chain choice matters

Open USD was unveiled at the end of June, per The Next Web’s July 1 report. Since then, reports have named more than one launch chain, and Ethereum is now among them.

When the companies that run card payments, custody and settlement put their shared dollar on a chain, that choice says a lot about where institutional crypto infrastructure is heading. And the timing compounds the signal: in late July, Morgan Stanley listed staked Ether and Solana ETPs on NYSE Arca. The institutional stack, from regulated investment products to consortium money, keeps settling on the same base layer.

Governance as the experiment

The launch will test something genuinely new: whether a committee of 140 companies can govern money that institutions actually want to hold. Consortium governance avoids single-issuer risk, but it introduces its own question, the speed and coherence of decisions made by that many parties.

The token is expected to go live later this year. Launch day will show whether the open-standard model is the future of the digital dollar or a very well-funded experiment.