Open USD is a new dollar stablecoin announced by Open Standard, an independent company governed by a board of its more than 140 partners, including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, and Coinbase. It standardizes how the dollar is issued, redeemed, and governed. It does not specify how the dollar moves between two parties, and that settlement layer is where most of the cost and speed actually live.
What is Open USD?
Open USD is a stablecoin built to be shared infrastructure rather than one issuer's product. Open Standard, the company behind it, lets partners mint and redeem at no cost, returns reserve earnings to those partners, and gives them board seats. More than 140 businesses signed on at launch, per Open Standard's introduction of Open USD. It goes live later in 2026.
The announcement is precise about some layers and silent on others. Here is what it actually commits to:
| Question | Open USD's answer |
|---|---|
| Who issues the dollar? | Open Standard, governed by a 140-partner board |
| What does minting and redemption cost? | Zero, with no limits on volume |
| Who earns the reserve interest? | Partners, minus a small management fee |
| Which network does it settle on? | Not specified in the announcement |
| How fast and how cheap is a transfer? | Depends on that unstated settlement layer |
The top three rows are the news. The bottom two are the question the launch does not answer.
What problem does Open USD actually solve?
Open USD solves the politics and economics of issuance. Most stablecoins are one company's product: the issuer keeps the reserve interest, sets the redemption fees, and decides the roadmap. Open USD spreads all three across its partners. That is a real change for businesses that move large dollar volume and want a say in the dollar they depend on.
Zach Abrams, founding CEO of Open Standard, framed the gap it targets:
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.
The demand behind that is not hypothetical. The Q2 2024 a16z State of Crypto report measured it directly:
Stablecoin transaction volumes more than doubled Visa's $3.9 trillion in transactions over the same period
That was $8.5 trillion across 1.1 billion transactions, per the a16z State of Crypto 2024 report. Open USD is a bet on capturing that volume with better governance and economics than today's issuers offer.
Does Open USD say how the dollars will move?
No. The announcement names the issuer, the governance, the reserve economics, and the zero-cost minting, but it does not name a settlement network. "High-throughput" is asserted as a goal, not described as a mechanism. There is no mention of which chain, which rail, or how a payment from one business to another clears.
That omission matters because the rail, not the token, is what a payer experiences. A dollar that is cheap to mint but expensive or slow to send is still expensive or slow to use. The reserve economics live with the issuer and its partners. The cost and speed of an actual payment live with whatever network carries it, and that network is exactly the part Open USD has not specified.
Why does the settlement rail still matter for a stablecoin?
Because the rail is what the customer feels. Manuel Godoy, CEO of the remittance app Félix, said it plainly in the same announcement:
The customer does not care what rail moves the money. They care that their family receives local currency quickly, reliably, and at a fair price.
Quickly, reliably, and at a fair price are properties of the network, not the token. Card rails make the comparison concrete: Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per domestic card payment, per Stripe's published pricing. A stablecoin can beat that only if the rail under it is cheaper. Lightning, Bitcoin's payment network, settles in under a second for a fraction of a cent, with live capacity published on the Amboss Space Lightning explorer. The token sets the unit of account. The rail sets the cost.
Is "open" issuance the same as open infrastructure?
Not quite, and the distinction is worth naming. Open USD is open in a governance sense: a board, partner seats, shared reserve earnings. Andy Fang of DoorDash described it that way:
What sets Open USD apart is that it's genuinely open: no single company controls it, and the partners building on it have a seat at the table.
A 140-company board is broader than a single issuer. It is still a consortium with a membership model. Bitcoin and Lightning are open in a different sense: permissionless infrastructure that needs no board seat to build on. Mastercard's own Chief Product Officer, Jorn Lambert, made the case for that kind of network in the same launch:
The technologies that changed the world, from the internet to mobile networks, succeeded because they became shared infrastructure that anyone could build on.
Lightning is that shared infrastructure for money. It can carry any dollar stablecoin over a single neutral rail using Taproot Assets, the protocol Lightning Labs built for issuing assets on Bitcoin. Whichever dollar a business ends up holding, the network it moves on is a separate and arguably more important choice.
Where does Amboss fit?
Amboss does not issue a stablecoin and is not a competitor to Open USD. Amboss builds the settlement layer that the announcement leaves open. Amboss Payments accepts USDT, USDC, and bitcoin over Lightning through one connection, at 0.5% of volume plus $30 per month, per the Amboss Payments documentation, with funds settling to infrastructure you control. If a new dollar like Open USD ships, the question for a business is the same one it is today: which network moves it quickly, cheaply, and without a separate integration per chain. That is the problem the Amboss Payments API for payment providers is built to answer, and it is covered in more depth in this comparison of stablecoin rails and Lightning.
Frequently asked questions
What is Open USD?
Open USD is a dollar-pegged stablecoin from Open Standard, an independent company governed by a board of more than 140 partner businesses. Partners can mint and redeem it at no cost, share the interest earned on its reserves, and hold board seats. It is positioned as shared infrastructure for moving dollars rather than a single issuer's product, and it is set to launch later in 2026.
Who is behind Open USD?
Open Standard runs Open USD, with a board made up of its partners so decisions reflect collective interest rather than one company. The launch named more than 140 businesses, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, BNY, Shopify, and DoorDash, per Open Standard's announcement. The partner list spans card networks, banks, exchanges, and large merchants.
When does Open USD launch?
Open Standard says Open USD will be live later in 2026. The announcement introduced the company, the governance model, and the partner roster, but did not give a specific date or name the settlement network the stablecoin will run on. Businesses evaluating it now are reacting to the structure and the partner list rather than a shipped product.
What blockchain does Open USD use?
The launch announcement does not specify a settlement network or blockchain for Open USD. It commits to zero-cost minting, redemption with no volume limits, and shared reserve economics, but leaves the question of how payments actually clear unanswered. That settlement layer, not the token itself, determines how fast and how cheap a transfer is in practice.
How is Open USD different from USDC or USDT?
USDC and USDT are issued by single companies that keep the reserve interest and set the rules, and they are issued across many separate blockchains, per Circle's USDC data. Open USD changes the ownership model: partners share reserve earnings and govern the dollar through a board. The peg goal is the same. The difference is who controls and profits from the issuance.
Can a stablecoin like Open USD run on Lightning?
Yes. Lightning can carry dollar stablecoins over one rail using Taproot Assets, settling in under a second for a fraction of a cent. The stablecoin is held at the edge of the network, while value moves across it as bitcoin and is converted back on the final hop. That gives any dollar a fast, low-cost, single-integration network regardless of which issuer stands behind it.