Looking at Stripe's ambitions and the future of stablecoins from OUSD

Author: EudemoniaCC

The battle of stablecoins is determined by the scenario, where channels are king and networks win. As stablecoins shift from asset competition to network competition, Stripe is also attempting to redefine the global Money Movement OS. OUSD is the inevitable intersection of stablecoin development and Stripe's strategic evolution, but it is just the beginning; ambitions await realization, and the future has not yet arrived. The road ahead is long and challenging; may we have a thick snow slope.

On June 30, 2026, an independent company called @openstandard launched Open USD (OUSD), with over 140 initial partners, including many with conflicting relationships as fierce rivals. Payment networks like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express formed an alliance around OUSD, enjoying at least 50%+ revenue sharing from USDC reserves with Coinbase betting on both sides, supporting Stripe, a payment platform that accounts for 1.6% of global GDP, which officially announced that OUSD would become the default stablecoin for its platform enterprises. Additionally, among the partners are banks and financial institutions spanning Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, as well as internet platforms like Google, Shopify, and DoorDash. Thus, the release of OUSD is interpreted as a clear encirclement of Circle by traditional finance and internet giants, leading to a 17.5% drop in Circle's stock price on the same day.[1]

It is worth mentioning that as early as June 3, Coindesk reported that @stripe planned to form an alliance to issue a new type of stablecoin to challenge the dominance of Circle and Tether, and the CEO of Open Standard is also @Stablecoin's founder and CEO @zcabrams. Given that Bridge was acquired by Stripe in 2025 for an estimated $1.1 billion, Stripe is widely regarded as the core driver of OUSD.[2] So what innovations does OUSD have that allow Stripe to raise a new banner for stablecoins, and why does the industry need such a new type of stablecoin that only Stripe can and will create?

1. OUSD: Stablecoins Begin to Shift from Asset Competition to Network Competition

In fact, analyzing from the perspectives of anchoring, minting, and redeeming, OUSD as an asset does not present any new tricks; it remains pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio, allowing partners to mint and redeem at zero cost without limits. The other two design principles point to innovations at the governance level:

• Organizational Openness: The actual controlling board is composed of partners for joint governance, not subordinate to any single entity, including Stripe.

• Revenue Sharing: Disrupting the traditional stablecoin profit model where issuers monopolize reserve interest, the reserve income is returned to the corporate partners responsible for distribution and adoption after deducting a minimal management fee.

This chaordic organizational form inevitably evokes memories of Visa from half a century ago, when Bank of America decided to open up the issuance rights of its credit cards, forming a shared payment network in the banking industry by authorizing other banks across regions. Thus, Visa was born, becoming synonymous with the industry standard for cards.[3] Today, Visa joining the OUSD stablecoin payment network feels like retracing its steps, endorsing industry co-construction, open standards, and network governance, allowing competitors to jointly own and maintain the network, which is the solution the financial industry has been seeking for half a century.

Essentially, OUSD represents a networked decentralization of the minting power. As asset differences are erased, the decisive factor shifts to the platform network of application assets, signaling the transition of stablecoins from asset competition to network competition.

2. Scenarios Determine Everything: The Three Paradigm Evolutions of Stablecoins

To understand why stablecoins are shifting from asset competition to network competition, one must grasp the changes in industry demand behind the three paradigm evolutions of stablecoins. The essence of stablecoins is cross-border digital dollars, and each significant growth phase of stablecoins has stemmed from new industry demands, corresponding to further expansions of network boundaries.

First Paradigm · Digital Dollar: Crypto Transactions Require Trustworthy On-Chain Dollars

The birth of stablecoins was driven by Tether in 2014, which seized the demand for a stable value anchor for around-the-clock trading in the crypto market. The need for real-time settlement of cryptocurrency transactions and stable value transmission required on-chain digital dollars, leading to the birth of USDT, which brought the dollar onto the blockchain. As the crypto market expanded and institutions entered, higher demands for asset trustworthiness emerged, requiring more compliant and transparent on-chain dollars, resulting in the emergence of Circle's USDC, which further pushed stablecoins towards compliance and institutionalization. Currently, USDT has an issuance scale of approximately $186 billion, while USDC follows closely with about $74 billion, together occupying over 80% of the stablecoin market share.[4]

Under the paradigm of digital dollars, the assets behind stablecoins are all supported by US dollars and U.S. Treasury yields, with differences lying in whether reserves are sufficient, transparent, trustworthy, auditable, and whether there is enough asset liquidity to support crypto market transactions. The logic of assets and transaction logic are inseparable, and stablecoins remain within the crypto world, competing for pricing power in CEX and DeFi, where liquidity is king.

Second Paradigm · Platform Dollar: Platforms Have Their Own Dollars but Are in a Predicament

Stablecoins began to step out of the crypto industry, focusing on the financial essence of crypto, entering the financial backend of real commercial platforms. In 2023, PayPal issued PYUSD through the regulated Paxos, embedding it into the existing scenarios and user ecosystems of the platform, supporting YouTube creators' payments, merchant settlements, B2B transfers, and internal Treasury functions. This undoubtedly opened a new entry point and new scenarios for stablecoins, also meeting PayPal's and other platforms' needs for asset isolation, deployment freedom, and cost savings with their own dollars.

However, the moat also became a boundary; the platform's distribution capability established the platform dollar, while the platform's closed ecosystem and competitive relationships cursed the platform dollar. As PayPal's revenue growth significantly slowed, with only a 4.3% increase in total revenue for the year 2025, the mid-life crisis of PayPal trapped PYUSD in a slowly growing ecological loop, with its current market value around $2.74 billion.[5]

Third Paradigm · Network Dollar: Cross-Border Settlement Dollar Shared by Platform Networks

Crypto Winter, but Stablecoin Summer. Crypto payments are gradually being validated as a new scenario for stablecoins beyond transactions, as the crypto industry returns to its financial essence. Circle, as a compliant stablecoin issuer, naturally hopes to enter the payment scenario, launching the Circle Payments Network (CPN) focusing on the clearing network, issuing its own public chain Arc, which means the issuer is getting involved in the entire process it wants to cover. However, Circle does not actually control any distribution channels or specific scenarios. The launch of OUSD resonates with platforms that control users, channels, and scenarios, declaring their bargaining power, whether to become subsidized downstream or nodes of their own network, with internet giants and traditional financial institutions voting with the channel traffic of specific payment scenarios.

"Issuance itself does not bring any economic value beyond 'the distribution capability you already possess.'" [6] I believe Catalini's statement reflects the philosophy behind Stripe's choice to issue OUSD through Open Standard, designing stablecoins as shared assets rather than exclusive platform assets, sharing minting rights, governance rights, revenue rights, and network construction rights among platforms.

This is because scenarios determine everything, channels are king, and networks win.

If USDT and USDC have achieved the digitization of the dollar, and PYUSD has achieved the platformization of the dollar, then OUSD attempts to achieve the platform networkization of digital dollars. Essentially, this is the process of the minting power being continuously decentralized, as digital dollars begin to reorganize themselves according to internet network effects.

3. OUSD is the Inevitable Intersection of Stablecoin Development and Stripe's Strategic Evolution

After more than a decade of development, stablecoins have finally transitioned from the crypto world into the broader financial world, shifting the competitive focus from assets to networks, and the boundaries of the Stablecoin Movement are widening. In another independently evolving path, Stripe, which started in payments, has also traversed sixteen years since 2010, expanding its capabilities from payments to receivables, now able to serve the entire process of corporate cash flow, making it one of the largest unlisted unicorns. In 2025, Stripe's total transaction volume reached $19 trillion, a 34% increase from 2024, accounting for approximately 1.6% of global GDP.[7] When the world needs a sovereign open cross-border payment dollar network, Stripe also hopes to transform into the infrastructure for global Money Movement, and OUSD is almost inevitably the intersection of these two strategic evolution paths.

Having previously outlined the development of stablecoins, let's now outline the development of Stripe to understand its ambitions, which will help explain why a new type of stablecoin like OUSD is most likely to be realized by Stripe. To answer this question, we can divide Stripe's development into three stages. This division is not an official definition by Stripe but rather a framework for understanding its strategic evolution.

First Stage · Payment OS: Internet-Native Payment Collaboration

In 2010, the Collison brothers from Ireland, @patrickc @collision, discovered a new business opportunity amid the surging entrepreneurial wave in Silicon Valley—how to enable startups to quickly receive money from users. The pain point of difficulty in receiving payments became the starting point for Stripe. The brothers encapsulated complex financial infrastructure into APIs that developers could directly call, marking the internet-nativeization of payments; for the first time, payments became callable application modules for businesses, rather than highly complex necessary engineering.

To enable any internet company to more easily accept funds from around the world, Stripe began to expand its basic payment capabilities beyond just receiving and making payments, also adding global payment methods and acquiring the African payment company Paystack, which serves 60,000 businesses, to achieve regional expansion, focusing on horizontal development in the global market.

At this stage, Stripe, as Payment OS, is positioned at the entry point of payments.

Second Stage · Finance OS: Internet Finance Deep in Customer Backends

Payments epitomize the industry of "wanting to establish oneself while helping others," and Stripe emphasizes "user-centric" and "the success of our customers is our success," because Stripe's rapid growth is built on the rapid development of key customers like Shopify, which are deeply integrated. After further upgrading the Connect product in 2015, Stripe focused on platform-type customers, which now account for over 50% of their revenue.

To better serve platform-type customers, Stripe gradually deepened its product line into the financial backends of enterprises. In 2021, by acquiring Recko, Stripe enabled payment reconciliation and financial data matching; the same year, it acquired TaxJar to enhance tax processing capabilities. These capabilities, combined with products like Billing, Issuing, and Treasury, transformed Stripe from a payment tool into a comprehensive revenue and financial management system, creating a natural deep binding that makes it difficult to replace between Stripe's growth and customer growth. After A/B testing, customers using Stripe can achieve approximately a 10.5% increase in payment conversion rates and a 12% increase in revenue.[8]

At this stage, Stripe, as Finance OS, enters the operational backend of enterprises from the transaction entry point.

Third Stage · Money Movement OS: Stablecoins Empowering AI Financial Layers Globally

In 2024, Stripe processed a total payment volume of $14 trillion, a 38% year-on-year increase, achieving profitability. After this, Stripe's strategic boundaries changed again, systematically building capabilities for holding, issuing, converting, routing, settling, and spending funds beyond mature payment and financial capabilities. Stablecoins are unanimously regarded as the top priority strategy, while AI is a highly focused emerging industry, with OpenAI and Anthropic being major clients of Stripe.

Stripe has been continuously acquiring companies related to stablecoins, acquiring the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge in February 2025 for approximately $1.1 billion at a fivefold premium, expanding the supported countries and regions from over 50 to over 150, solving asset issuance and cross-border fund routing; the same year, it acquired the programmable wallet company Privy, valued at $230 million, to address wallet and account issues; and collaborated with Paradigm to incubate the blockchain Tempo aimed at payment scenarios, solving on-chain settlement. In 2025, in addition to stablecoin actions, Stripe also acquired Orum, a bank real-time payment and multi-track routing orchestration layer, and in 2026, Stripe completed the acquisition of usage-based billing company Metronome, further enhancing its full-link capabilities from "billing → receivables → clearing → fund flow."

Essentially, Stripe is building a Real-time Money Movement OS for the AI and stablecoin era, enabling any software, especially AI agents, to automatically complete billing, payments, routing, and cross-track clearing as easily as calling an API. Through stablecoins, the clearing and settlement layer can be programmable, low-cost, high-throughput, and globally accessible.

Currently valued at $159 billion but delaying its IPO, Stripe resembles a patient hunter, armed with stablecoins as a globally prepared weapon, targeting the entire internet economy and even the future AI Agent economy's flow of funds.

Through Bridge + Privy + Tempo, Stripe has formed a complete stablecoin infrastructure, capable of having its own stablecoin. Through a B2B model, Stripe serves 5 million businesses, including all top AI companies, 90% of many large blue-chip companies that are components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 80% of most leading tech companies in the Nasdaq 100 index, and a large number of newly established startups (currently, 25% of new companies registered in Delaware are founded through Stripe Atlas). This is a real distribution channel and business network; Stripe has the demand and motivation to have its own stablecoin, but it also has the confidence to share the revenue from stablecoin issuance.

Moreover, card organizations, banks, internet giants, and crypto companies, which appear among the first partners of OUSD, are also Stripe's partners. By sharing the asset issuance and reserve income of stablecoins with them, Stripe can still earn revenue throughout the entire lifecycle of funds, while issuing a closed stablecoin would only undermine its payment network's neutrality and reduce platform enterprise adoption rates. After all, Stripe is not competing for the profit pool of a single stablecoin but for the control plane of future global fund movement, and it has the capability and motivation to form an open stablecoin network.

To have all these elements and be such a strong company is no small feat. OUSD finds no better soil, and Stripe needs this open, non-monopolistic new type of stablecoin, which is both necessary and inevitable.

4. Ambitions Await Realization; the Future Has Not Yet Arrived

"We haven't won yet" is a slogan often mentioned internally at Stripe. Payments are just the starting point for Stripe, which is continuously expanding the boundaries of Money Movement. As the internet enters the AI Agent era, the objects of Money Movement are also beginning to shift from "people" to "machines," and new territories are still on the horizon.

Regarding Agentic Payment, the payment industry is highly optimistic, with both large and small companies entering the fray. However, as Agent Ecommerce has not yet truly exploded, the necessity and depth of stablecoin applications within it remain widely debated. It is reported that Anthropic is currently focusing on the natural growth brought by model capabilities and has not adopted Stripe's recommended stablecoin payment solution, while the monthly traffic of the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) jointly released by Stripe and Tempo has recently not exceeded $10,000 after the initial tide receded.[9] Regardless of where Agentic Payment develops, Stripe is already standing at the forefront with its surfing gear.

As for OUSD, which appears in the posture of a challenger alliance, it has been declared a success in its first encirclement by the capital market, yet it has not truly been issued, giving a sense of "winning without a fight." Practitioners are more focused on and looking forward to how much deep support OUSD will receive from the partners on the "list" when it goes live "later this year." Currently, only Stripe has adopted the "default" positioning language, making a practical business flow commitment.

Did Visa walk the path from 1958 to 2007, decentralizing governance rights to reclaim its listing? Is this the path OUSD wants to take? And as a chaordic organization, Visa's birth was inseparable from Dee Hock, the person who presided over everything. Will Zach always be the spokesperson for OUSD? Visa later faced challenges from Mastercard and fell into monopoly doubts; will the story of the dragon-slaying youth becoming the evil dragon repeat itself?

From Tether's USDT to Circle's USDC, and then to PayPal's PYUSD and other new stablecoins, each challenger has not completely overturned, replaced, or even surpassed the pioneers, but has merely weakened the market expectations and imaginations of the former. Will Open Standard's OUSD be an exception by opening up the traditional financial payment market?

All questions end with a question mark, as Stripe's ambition for Money Movement in the AI Agent era is still waiting to be realized, and the future of stablecoins in network competition after experiencing three paradigm shifts has not truly arrived. The road ahead is long and challenging; may we have a thick snow slope.

@EudemoniaCC

A crypto payment practitioner who loves cooking, climbing, and writing, just left to travel around Italy, New York, and Silicon Valley. After an injury from climbing, I urgently returned home for seclusion. Currently not employed, previously served as Head of APAC at @MorphNetwork, a public chain focused on payments under @bitget, where I created a phenomenally viral Card Campaign with a budget of zero (actually studied this, just graduated from Tsinghua last year; if I hadn't chosen crypto in the summer of 2022, I might be a tech journalist now).

Reference:

1. [1]https://joinopenstandard.com/blog/introducing-open-usd

2. [2]https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/06/03/payment-giants-stripe-visa-mastercard-said-to-be-among-backers-of-soon-to-debut-stablecoin-platform

3. [3]One From Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization, Dee Hock

4. [4]https://defillama.com/stablecoins?utm_source

5. [5]https://www.tekedia.com/pyusd-has-accelerated-stablecoin-mainstreaming-challenging-legacy-systems

6. [6]https://ssrn.com/abstract=3137213

7. [7]https://stripe.com/zh-us/annual-updates/2025

8. [8]https://colossus.com/episode/collison-a-business-state-of-mind

9. [9] Author's communication with employees of Anthropic and Stripe in Silicon Valley in June 2026

10. [10]https://stripe.com/en-ca/jobs/culture

11. [11]The Total Economic Impact™ Of Stripe Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Stripe JULY 2022

12. [12]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZAO4ibnz6A

13. [13]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNMYz17vnaQ

14. [14]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmnWHz8HD74&t=1906s

15. [15]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxP55dZjqZs

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