In June, a consortium of more than 140 companies announced Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-pegged stablecoin coordinated by a new entity, Open Standard. Circle’s shares fell sharply on the day. On 30 September, OUSD went live on Ethereum, Solana and Base, with more than 200 partners and over $1 billion of seed liquidity committed by Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa. BlackRock and BNY are among the reserve providers.
For Europe, it would be easy to dismiss OUSD as another dollar product. That would be a mistake. Its importance lies less in the token itself than in the model behind it, and in what that model says about who will build the next layer of payment infrastructure.
Not a Neutral Development for Europe
Stablecoins can make payments faster, cheaper and programmable. They also decide which currency becomes most useful in digital commerce. Dollar tokens already dominate the market, with USDT and USDC alone accounting for the overwhelming majority of supply. A consortium of this size, built by the companies that already sit on most merchant and payment flows, could deepen that dominance considerably.
Businesses will welcome faster dollar settlement, particularly in cross-border trade. Policymakers and banks have to weigh something else: what happens to the euro’s role, and to Europe’s ability to shape its own payment infrastructure, if the default settlement asset of the internet is a private dollar token.
The Real Innovation Is the Economics
Until now, stablecoins have followed a simple issuer model. One company issues the token, holds the reserves and keeps the interest they earn. That interest is the business: it generated the overwhelming majority of Circle’s revenue last year.
OUSD reverses this. Minting and redemption are free, and nearly all reserve income, after a management fee, flows to the partners that drive distribution and usage. Governance sits with a board drawn from consortium members rather than with a single issuer.
The logic is sound. Digital money does not succeed because it is technically efficient. It succeeds when the businesses that connect it to real commerce, such as banks, payment providers, marketplaces and platforms, have a reason to promote it. OUSD pays them to do so.
Where MiCA Draws the Line
This is also where the model meets European regulation. Under MiCA, issuers of e-money tokens and the service providers that distribute them may not grant interest, or any benefit linked to how long a holder keeps the token.
Sharing reserve income with distribution partners is not, in itself, paying interest to holders. But the commercial incentive for those partners is to pass part of that income on to attract balances, and that is exactly where European supervisors will look. A model built around redistributing reserve yield will need careful structuring to operate in the EU, and the outcome will depend on how regulators interpret that line in practice.
Governance and Accountability
A shared model widens distribution, but it complicates accountability. A board of large partners with different priorities and regulatory exposures still has to answer simple questions: who is responsible for reserves, disclosures, redemption and compliance, and who decides under pressure?
Partner lists attract attention. Long-term credibility depends on transparent governance, reliable operations and clear responsibility when something goes wrong. Innovation may open the door, but accountability keeps it open.
Europe Is Not Starting from Zero
Europe already has the beginnings of its own answer. Qivalis, a consortium that has grown to 37 European banks, including ING, UniCredit, BNP Paribas, CaixaBank and Danske Bank, has just received authorisation as an electronic money institution from the Dutch central bank and plans to begin issuing a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin in the coming months. Alongside it sit tokenised deposit initiatives, instant payment rails and the ECB’s digital euro project.
These are the right building blocks. The question is whether they will be built with the same commercial ambition. OUSD’s lesson for Europe is not its currency but its distribution strategy: it gives every participant in the payment chain a stake in adoption. A euro alternative that is well regulated but poorly distributed will struggle against a dollar token that pays its partners to promote it.
European banks bring what OUSD still has to prove: regulatory experience, customer trust, safeguarding and supervision. Those are the conditions that let digital money operate reliably at scale. But they are only an advantage if banks use them to build, rather than to wait.
Open USD may or may not succeed. Its value for Europe is that it sharpens the question: who will build the trusted digital money infrastructure for the next stage of payments, and will the euro have a meaningful place in it?
