OUSD Pays Its Distributors. The Stablecoin Model Just Flipped.

Conclusion first: the stablecoin business has had one revenue engine for a decade, and it is the interest earned on the reserves backing the tokens. On 30 September 2026 a new dollar token launched with that engine handed to somebody else. Open USD, issued by Bridge and governed by a group of five founding partners, returns almost all of its reserve earnings to the partners that put the token into circulation, charges nothing to mint or redeem it, and pays for growth in equity rather than in marketing.

What actually launched

The issuer is Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought for $1.1 billion in 2024, and the product is governed by Open Standard rather than by one company. The founding partners are Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa, each taking an equal initial equity stake and together committing more than $1 billion of launch liquidity. Bloomberg counted more than 100 member companies; Open Standard puts its own number above 200 financial institutions, banks, fintechs and businesses, a list that includes UBS, DBS, ANZ, American Express, Western Union, BlackRock, BNY and Google.

The token arrived with about $477 million in circulation by Bridge’s own dashboard, including more than $400 million of liquidity on Tempo alone. That is a real launch for a day-one product, and it is a rounding error against the incumbents: total stablecoin supply was about $308 billion in August 2026, with Tether at roughly 59 percent of it and Circle’s USDC at about 23.

Two revenue lines, given away on purpose

For most of the category’s history there were two ways to earn. The first is the float: a dollar arrives, the issuer buys a Treasury bill, and the interest belongs to the issuer while the holder gets a token that pays nothing. Circle and Tether together hold roughly $260 billion of that float, which at a 4 percent bill yield is about $10.4 billion a year of interest income retained inside two companies. The second is the spread on minting and redemption. OUSD gave up both, keeping only a small transaction fee.

Instead, nearly all reserve earnings are routed to the partner network, minus a small management fee, and partners are paid in dollars in proportion to the OUSD supply and transaction activity they drive. Forkast called this inverting the stablecoin tax, which is the right way to describe it: distribution stops being a cost line and becomes a claim on the revenue.

One regulatory fact explains the shape of the deal. The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, requires payment stablecoin issuers to hold 100 percent reserves in high-quality liquid assets, segregate custody and disclose periodically, and it prohibits paying yield to token holders. A structure that paid reserve interest to wallets would run into that prohibition. OUSD pays distributors instead, which is legally a different party and economically a different design, and analysts have flagged that distinction as one to watch.

Equity for usage is Visa’s structure, thirty years earlier

The second half of the model is who ends up owning the company. Open Standard says the overwhelming majority of its equity will be distributed over four to five years according to how much OUSD supply and activity each partner drives. Founding partners get no special revenue share; they are paid on the same contribution basis as everyone else, against a minimum participation threshold that has not been disclosed. Chief executive Zach Abrams expects the founding investor group to grow from five to somewhere between ten and twelve companies, and he rejects the word cooperative, since management runs the operation and ownership sits with the investors.

The comparison the industry keeps reaching for is Visa, which was owned by its member banks until it listed in 2008, and Mastercard, which listed in 2006. In that model the banks that distribute the network also own the network, so the incentive to route volume through it is also an incentive to increase the value of their own stake. A stablecoin organised that way is not trying to out-yield a Treasury bill. It is trying to make the largest possible group of payment intermediaries own a reason for its token to win.

Distribution is the product, and one partner owns a lot of it

Stripe made OUSD the default stablecoin across its business products, with businesses holding it in Stripe Treasury, spending it through stablecoin cards issued under Stripe Issuing, and sending it to wallets in more than 100 countries, running on Stripe’s Tempo network by default. That single commitment is worth more than the fee schedule, because Stripe already sits in front of the merchants who need dollar rails.

The partners are not exclusive, and that is the part worth understanding rather than criticising. The same businesses that now earn on OUSD supply also support USDC and other tokens, because their own customers choose. So this is not a war to eliminate the incumbents. It is a contest over which token gets picked as the default when a merchant, a bank or a card network configures a new product, and OUSD has arranged for a large number of those configurers to be paid in proportion to that choice.

The load-bearing risk is a board of competitors

Every arrangement of this kind carries one specific failure mode, and this category has already lived it twice: Meta’s Diem was a consortium of companies with competing interests, and the Centre Consortium behind USDC was eventually absorbed into a single issuer. A board of direct commercial rivals deciding reserve policy, chain expansion, blocklisting and fee structure has high coordination costs, and the mechanism that aligns interests in the good case is the same mechanism that makes every partner’s participation conditional. Partner commitments at launch were not binding, and at least one company named in early coverage disputed its participation.

The rest of the risk register is ordinary. Tether and USDC control more than 80 percent of supply, and switching the default rail is slow. A monthly attestation is a receipt from an outside firm that reserves existed on a date; it is not an audit of the business. And the reserve mix is cash, bills and money market funds held across BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY, which is exactly what the 2025 law requires and also exactly what every regulated issuer already does.

What was actually inverted

Read as a product, OUSD is another dollar token with the same collateral rules, the same four chains and the same free minting that the market already offers. Read as a structure, it is the first one to hand the float and the cap table to the people who do the selling, which is why the launch mattered more to payments companies than to traders. A stablecoin is a receipt whose issuer keeps the interest; this one gives the interest to the intermediaries, and asks to be repaid in volume and in equity held by the same intermediaries.

The test of the model is not the token’s market share this quarter. It is whether the five founders and the two hundred participants who signed up keep behaving like owners when a partner’s own product competes with the network. Distribution was the scarce asset in this category, and OUSD is the first issuer to pay market price for it in the one currency the incumbents never had to spend.