Several of the world’s payments and tech giants have agreed to use the money movement stablecoin Open USD.
That coin is set to go live later this year, according to an announcement Tuesday (June 30) from Open Standard, the company behind Open USD. It noted in a blog post that the launch is happening as stablecoin transaction volume is approaching that of the ACH network.
“At the same time, businesses still face significant hurdles: fees to mint and redeem most stablecoins are prohibitively expensive at larger volumes; companies aren’t always able to benefit from the revenues earned on the underlying reserves; and developers have little recourse if the roadmaps of third-party issuers do not meet their needs,” the post added.
Users can “mint and redeem Open USD at no cost, and with no artificial limits on volume,” the company said. Partners will collect all of the earnings from Open USD’s reserves, minus a “small management fee” to cover the coin’s operational costs.
Among the several dozen companies who have signed on to use Open USD are Visa, Google, Mastercard, Coinbase, American Express, DoorDash and Plasma, which is providing the blockchain infrastructure that allows for instant money movement.
“Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests,” said Zach Abrams, founding CEO of Open Standard. “We’re thrilled to bring together over 140 businesses to launch Open USD. It’s a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it.”
In other stablecoin news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the ethereum blockchain’s place in the digital asset space after it fell 25% during June amid a corporate restructuring.
“For payment providers moving money internationally, transaction cost matters more than blockchain loyalty,” that report said. “Treasury departments prioritize settlement certainty, liquidity and regulatory compliance over developer ecosystems, while banks evaluating tokenized deposits are asking which network best supports operational resilience rather than which one pioneered decentralized finance.”
Ethereum, the report continued, is still highly valuable as a programmable settlement environment that can support sophisticated financial applications. But if institutional adoption centers around moving dollars efficiently rather than creating decentralized applications, competitive advantages begin shifting toward “throughput, interoperability, operational simplicity and regulatory integration.”
As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote earlier this, the long-term winner could be tokenized deposits that uphold the regulatory structure and economics of commercial banking while offering the programmability and around-the-clock settlement capabilities that come with blockchain-based money.