A stablecoin is a digital dollar: one coin, always worth $1, because the issuer holds a real dollar in reserve for every coin it creates. The actual business behind that promise is float income — the interest earned by investing those reserves while they sit in the bank, waiting to be redeemed.
On June 30, Open Standard launched Open USD, a new stablecoin backed by more than 140 companies — including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, and Stripe — promising zero fees to mint or redeem it, at any volume. Circle, the company behind rival stablecoin USDC, lost 17% of its stock value that same day.
Zero fees sounds generous, but fees were never where the money came from. When a company takes your dollar and hands you a stablecoin, it doesn’t just hold that dollar — it parks it in short-term U.S. Treasuries and pockets the interest. That’s float income: money that technically belongs to someone else, held just long enough to earn a return before it moves on. Insurance companies run on the identical principle, collecting premiums today and investing the gap before claims come due.
Tether and Circle built their entire profit model on this float. For Circle, interest income made up the overwhelming majority of last quarter’s revenue. Open USD’s pitch inverts that: instead of the issuer keeping the float, Open Standard splits it among the 140 partner companies actually distributing the coin — businesses that, under the old model, would never see a cent of that interest. Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard aren’t backing OUSD out of goodwill; they’re backing it because, for the first time, holding a stablecoin comes with a payout attached.
For readers with zero crypto background, the real lesson has nothing to do with tokens: every “free” financial product has a revenue engine hiding somewhere. What’s genuinely new here is that Open USD is the first major stablecoin to hand that engine to everyone touching it, instead of keeping it locked inside one company.
My take: Too many cooks make the best broth.
Not advice. Just how I see it.