Coinbase joins Visa and Mastercard to back Open Standard’s “Open USD” stablecoin network

Coinbase is joining Visa and Mastercard in backing Open Standard’s new stablecoin network, a consortium effort designed to make a dollar-pegged digital token easier and cheaper for businesses to use at scale. The project, called Open Standard, announced the launch of a USD-backed stablecoin, “Open USD,” with a broad lineup that includes major payment networks and cryptocurrency firms, alongside banks and other fintech companies.

The collaboration is framed around what Open Standard calls “key design principles,” including efforts to lower the cost of minting and redeeming stablecoins. According to reporting on the rollout, the consortium said Open USD would enable access without what it described as prohibitive fees and without artificial volume limits, aiming to remove friction that can limit stablecoin adoption for real-world payments.

Open Standard also described a revenue-sharing model for the stablecoin’s reserves. Under the approach described in the launch materials covered by Banking Dive, earnings generated by Open USD’s reserves would be split among partners, with a management fee set aside for operational costs. The goal, as presented by the consortium, is to align incentives across network participants rather than concentrate control in a single operator.

Governance is another pillar. Open Standard said Open USD would be run “collaboratively,” with a board composed of partner members, and it described decision-making as intended to serve the collective interest rather than any one entity. The consortium structure matters in stablecoins because issuers and reserve operators can influence transparency, risk controls, and how quickly a token can adapt to regulatory or operational requirements.

The initial partner list highlighted by Banking Dive reportedly includes more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Stripe and Ripple, as well as banks such as BNY, U.S. Bank, Huntington and Citizens. While the consortium’s roster is broad, neither the reported rollout details nor the Yahoo Finance item behind this news prompt specify which partners will act as reserve counterparties, settlement participants, or platform integrators, beyond the general description of broad backing.

For Coinbase, the deal is consistent with a wider push in crypto infrastructure toward stablecoins that can be used by traditional payments ecosystems. Stablecoins are digital assets typically pegged one-to-one with a fiat currency, in this case the U.S. dollar, and they are often used to facilitate transfers because they can move on blockchain networks with faster settlement than many traditional rails.

For the payments industry, the immediate appeal is not just faster transfers but the prospect of stablecoin rails that can be economically viable for merchants and financial institutions. If Open Standard’s stated goal of lowering mint and redemption fees holds, the consortium’s model could encourage more frequent token circulation tied to payment flows, rather than limiting use to specialized or high-margin applications.

Still, the consortium has not publicly laid out, in the coverage available here, granular performance or compliance specifics such as reserve composition, redemption turnaround targets, audit cadence, or which jurisdictions each partner will support first. The rollout also does not clarify whether Open USD will prioritize a particular blockchain network or how it will handle interoperability with existing stablecoin infrastructure. Observers may also want to see how Open Standard’s approach fits within evolving U.S. stablecoin oversight efforts, which were referenced in the coverage as lawmakers continued working on guidance following passage of the “Genius Act.”