Open USD, the dollar stablecoin from the consortium Open Standard, went live on Solana on September 30, extending a launch that touched four blockchains in the same day. Businesses can mint and burn the token one-to-one for dollars at no cost, and the project has lined up more than $1 billion in committed liquidity from five of the biggest names in payments. Reserves sit at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY, with attestations published monthly. The Solana rollout uses Token-2022, the token standard behind previous regulated issuances on the network, which supports features such as confidential transfers at the protocol level rather than in a separate contract.
OUSD also launched natively on Ethereum, Base and Tempo, the payments-focused chain incubated by Stripe, with contract addresses published for each network. The Solana mint address is ousd2mJsPEckLHcSCDxyKD7NDGARZcfLbDZkKiatYHB. On Stripe’s platform the token is already set as a default option for businesses, which is where the reach may matter most: Stripe processes payment volume measured in the hundreds of billions annually, and a stablecoin that defaults on makes its way into ordinary commerce rather than trading accounts.
A shared-yield experiment
What separates OUSD from USDT and USDC is the economics. The yield generated by dollar reserves, mostly short-term Treasuries in practice, is distributed among network partners rather than retained by a single issuer. Patrick Collison, Stripe’s chief executive, confirmed the arrangement at the launch. In effect, OUSD tries to reproduce the interchange-plus-revenue-share logic of card networks inside a token, paying every participant in the network instead of enriching one balance sheet. That aligns incentives for distribution, and it is also why the consortium recruited so broadly: the more companies that integrate, the more the shared revenue has somewhere to go.
"A stablecoin is only as useful as the counterparties it can settle with. That is why every major stablecoin launch is happening on Solana: issuers understand it is where liquidity, neutrality, and ecosystem depth live," said Jamal Raees, general manager of payments at the Solana Foundation.
The consortium behind it spans much of the payments stack. Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa came in as the five founding partners with equal initial stakes and together committed more than $1 billion to establish liquidity. The broader list of companies planning integrations has passed 200, with UBS, SBI Holdings and Jeeves among recent additions. Open Standard first unveiled the project on June 30 with more than 140 businesses signed on. Reserves are held at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY, an arrangement designed to answer the transparency question that has shadowed larger issuers for years, since a monthly attestation from three named banks reads differently from an issuer’s self-certified report.
| Chain | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Solana | Payments, settlement | Token-2022, free 1:1 mint |
| Ethereum | DeFi liquidity | Deepest existing stablecoin market |
| Base | Consumer apps | Coinbase distribution |
| Tempo | Card and merchant rails | Stripe-incubated chain |
Small start, big claims
Reality on the ground is modest so far. Token data from Solana Compass showed about 18 million OUSD in supply on Solana held by 47 wallets on launch day by 19:24 UTC, and one report put initial reserves at $18 million. For comparison, Tether runs a supply near $180 billion and USDC near $60 billion, so OUSD needs months of settlement volume before it is a competitor in anything but headline terms. The gap between $1 billion committed and $18 million deployed is the number to watch each week.
The Solana Foundation framed the venue as a natural fit. Its figures put stablecoin volume on Solana above $5 trillion in 2026, with stablecoin supply on the network at $17.4 billion, up 18.8% year over year, and the number of addresses moving stablecoins in a given week more than doubled over the same period. The network’s median transaction fee is around $0.0013, which matters when the business model is moving money a million times a day rather than holding it. Wallet-scale numbers this small are usual on day one, and the Foundation’s argument is that real settlement demand, not speculation, is what ramps first.
Regulation and competition
The competitive picture is not only about Tether. USDC dominates the regulated segment, holding 54% of stablecoin market share in payments and consumer networks, exactly the lane OUSD is entering. Circle, USDC’s issuer, is simultaneously lobbying in Europe against bank-deposit mandates for stablecoins, and the ECB and EBA are reported to be sympathetic, so the ground rules for the whole category are still being written on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the Fed has proposed a two-day redemption deadline for stablecoins from January, which puts redemption speed into the compliance stack of every issuer, consortium or not. A bank-custodied, shared-yield token is a bet that regulation and merchant distribution, not first-mover scale, decide the endgame.
For Solana, the launch continues a run of institutional wins that includes PayPal, Fiserv and Western Union using Token-2022 for their own issuances, and it lands the same week the network is preparing its Alpenglow consensus upgrade, intended to cut finality from about 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds. Faster finality is a direct argument for settlement workloads, since a payment that takes 13 seconds to become irreversible is a payment merchants cannot accept at a counter. Solana’s price traded near $119 on launch day, down slightly, suggesting markets treated the news as incremental.
Whether OUSD’s numbers justify the consortium by Christmas is another matter. The token has distribution, custody and a yield formula, and what it does not have yet is volume. If free minting, merchant defaults and card-network plumbing move even a small slice of Stripe and Visa flow onchain, the supply curve will steepen quickly. If they do not, OUSD becomes another well-backed experiment in a crowded field. The next monthly attestation, covering the first weeks of live settlement, will say which story is real.