Hey, it's Marc.

What's happening: Open USD (OUSD), a new dollar stablecoin, went live on Wednesday on Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo. Bridge, a Stripe company, issues it. The dollars behind it sit at BlackRock, BNY and Lead Bank. Businesses can swap dollars for OUSD one for one, and back, "at no cost," the launch post says. Stripe made OUSD on Tempo its default stablecoin. Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa are the five founders, and 214 companies are on the partner list.

  1. A stablecoin is a pile of Treasury bills with a token on top. The bills pay interest.

  2. So the real business question is who keeps that interest.

  3. Circle, which issues USDC, collects it and pays most of it to partners under private deals. Coinbase has the best one.

  4. OUSD pays partners by a public formula: the more OUSD you bring in and move, the more you earn.

  5. It pays partners, not holders. What reaches you depends on the platform you use.

Why it matters: Everyone will call this "the USDC killer." We think that misses it. This is a fight over who gets the interest on the dollars behind the coin. What Circle loses first is bargaining power, not its $73 billion.

Subscribe

What happened: five payment giants built a stablecoin that pays its distributors

OUSD was announced on June 30 and went live three months later. Four things matter.