Stablecoins just entered a new phase. 馃А
For years, the competition was about technology. Today about economics.
On June 30th, OpenUSD was announced.
More than 140 companies joined the initiative.
Visa. Mastercard. Stripe. Coinbase. BlackRock. Google. Shopify.
The headlines immediately asked: "Is this finally a threat to stablecoins?"
The market answered differently.
Circle fell around 17%. Tether barely moved. Why?
Because the market has finally understood something important: There is no longer one stablecoin market.
There are several. Tether chose one path. Circle chose another. And OpenUSD just entered Circle's lane, not Tether's.
Circle built its success around regulated finance, institutional adoption and partnerships. Its business model relies heavily on the yield generated by the reserves backing USDC.
OpenUSD attacks that model directly. Instead of keeping the reserve yield, it shares it with the ecosystem.
Suddenly, banks, fintechs and payment companies have a financial incentive to distribute OpenUSD instead of USDC.
That's why investors reacted.
Not because USDC stopped working. But because Circle's economic moat suddenly has a credible challenger.
Tether, meanwhile, is playing a completely different game.
Its dominance comes from crypto trading, cross-border payments and providing access to digital dollars in parts of the world where traditional banking often falls short.
Its users aren't choosing between revenue-sharing models. They're choosing access.
That's why OpenUSD barely changes Tether's thesis.
But here's the part that fascinates us most.
OpenUSD is a consortium. And history hasn't always been kind to consortiums.
Finance is full of ambitious alliances that looked unbeatable on paper and quietly disappeared a few years later.
Why? Because building technology is often easier than aligning incentives.
When dozens, or hundreds, of companies sit around the same table, difficult questions emerge.
Who leads?
Who pays?
Who decides?
Who gives up revenue?
And what happens when members start competing with one another?
Some OpenUSD members still make billions from today's payment rails. Others are trying to replace those very rails.
Can companies genuinely collaborate to build something that may eventually cannibalise part of their own business?
Maybe. Maybe not. That's exactly what the market will discover over the coming years.
Meanwhile, one thing is becoming increasingly clear.
The stablecoin race is no longer about creating digital dollars.
It's about building economic networks.
Because money has always been driven by incentives.
Blockchain simply makes those incentives programmable.
Whether OpenUSD succeeds or not, the real winner will be the player that best aligns technology, incentives and adoption.
And history suggests that's much harder than announcing 140 partners on day one. 馃А
