Visa backs Open USD with a new stablecoin platform — and Circle's stock drops

Visa has launched its own platform for issuing and servicing the Open USD stablecoin, giving financial institutions tools to mint, hold, and transfer digital dollars — and on the same day, shares of Circle, USDC's issuer, fell roughly 5-6% as competition intensified.

What Open USD Is

Open USD is backed by the Open Standard consortium, which counts more than 140 companies among its members, including Visa, BlackRock, Alphabet, Coinbase, Mastercard, and Stripe. The stablecoin's debut is planned for the second half of 2026. The key difference from classic stablecoins like USDC: Open USD drops minting and redemption fees entirely, and distributes nearly all of its reserve income to the businesses that distribute it, keeping only a management fee for itself.

What Visa Actually Launched

The Visa Stablecoin Platform combines wallet infrastructure, stablecoin issuance tools, and Visa's own payment network, simplifying blockchain-based payments and settlement for banks and other financial-institution clients. According to Fortune, the platform gives participants access to a network of more than 200 million merchants already connected to Visa's infrastructure.

Why This Threatens Circle

CoinShares analyst Luke Nolan called Open USD the most credible threat yet to USDC's business model, precisely because it targets the underlying economics of stablecoin issuance rather than just offering a rival token:

“If successful, Open USD could push stablecoins further into mainstream payments by making the economics and governance more attractive for the businesses actually using them.”

— Luke Nolan, CoinShares analyst

Quote source: CoinDesk

According to CoinShares, this model could squeeze Circle's margins and raise the cost of maintaining USDC distribution, since it becomes economically more attractive for partners to work with a token that shares revenue with them. At the same time, analysts acknowledge that USDC's established liquidity and deep integration into existing infrastructure remain a serious barrier that any new entrant will find difficult to replicate.

What This Means in Practice

The Open USD story reflects a shift in the underlying logic of stablecoin competition: instead of fighting for users one token against another, a consortium of major financial and tech players is proposing to rewrite the industry's economics itself — so that reserve income flows not to the issuer, but to whoever actually brings users and transaction volume. If the model catches on, it could force other issuers to rethink who's entitled to the income generated by stablecoin reserves.

This material is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.