Stripe has made Open USD (OUSD) the default stablecoin for businesses that accept or move stablecoin payments on its platform, bypassing established tokens in favor of a consortium-built alternative from Open Standard, a group of more than 200 companies including Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Coinbase.

The token is issued by Bridge, Stripe's stablecoin subsidiary. OUSD launched on September 30, 2026, roughly three months after Open Standard first announced its formation on June 30, 2026. Each token is backed one-to-one by reserves held with BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY, and Bridge publishes monthly attestations of holdings at reserves.bridge.xyz/ousd.

The decision matters because of how OUSD distributes the economics of issuing a stablecoin. In the traditional model, a single issuer captures the yield generated by holding reserves in cash and short-term government debt. Open Standard describes this as issuer-captured yield and identifies it, along with conversion fees at scale, as the core problem the consortium wants to fix.

How does OUSD change the stablecoin business model?

After a small management fee, the bulk of the interest earned on reserves flows back to participating partners in the network rather than to a single issuer. The design is aimed at business users and includes several structural choices:

• Zero-fee minting and redemption. Converting dollars into OUSD, or cashing out, costs nothing.
• No volume caps. Businesses face no ceiling on minting or redemption volumes.
• Shared reserve economics. Most reserve yield returns to network partners after the management fee.
• Multichain from launch. OUSD runs natively on Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo.

Liquidity is available on Coinbase, Kraken and Uniswap. Bridge reported more than $400 million in OUSD liquidity at launch on Tempo alone.

What does the Stripe default actually mean?

By setting OUSD as the default, Stripe places the token in front of every business on its platform that opts into stablecoin payments. The initial rollout includes integrations with BVNK, a stablecoin payments infrastructure provider, and the Visa Stablecoin Platform.

The consortium has identified cross-border payments, settlement and institutional trading as the primary use cases.

The move is the clearest signal yet of how Stripe intends to use Bridge, which it acquired to gain an in-house issuer. Rather than launching a Stripe-branded coin and asking rivals to adopt it, Stripe helped assemble a group that includes its direct competitors in payments — Visa, Mastercard and American Express — giving those networks a financial stake in the token's success through the yield-sharing arrangement.

What comes next?

The structural question is adoption at scale. OUSD's zero-fee, uncapped minting and shared-yield model directly undercuts the economics of single-issuer tokens, and Stripe's default placement gives it immediate distribution across one of the largest business payments platforms. Whether Visa and Mastercard push the token through their own networks — and whether monthly attestations satisfy institutional counterparties in the absence of a full audit — will determine whether consortium stablecoins become a durable market structure or a single-platform experiment.