π¨ BREAKING: 100+ companies just backed Open USD, a dollar stablecoin run by a new independent company, Open Standard. Zach Abrams is interim CEO.
Five-minute reaction (and personal views only.)
The instinct is to count the logos when you see a lot of them. The design choices matter much more.
- No mint or redemption fees by default
- No arbitrary caps when you scale from $10k to $10m
- Reserve yield shared by default (issuers used to keep it)
This is clearly about scale, and going after the larger, industrial-grade payments volume.
Open Standard runs like a financial market infrastructure. It remids me more of things like SWIFT, the card networks, the clearing houses. Owned broadly, governed by a board, a little "boring" on purpose.
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Credible neutrality is the whole game.
One company's coin is a product. A coin a hundred competitors agree to share becomes a standard. The cap tables of SWIFT and the early clearing houses were the incumbents of their day in one room. This rhymes.
Look at the breadth too. Banks, card networks, crypto natives, fintechs, big tech, on one coin. A global PSP, a community bank, an international long-tail player. Everyone finds an animal in the picture that looks like them. That breadth is the ultra significant bit.
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For stablecoins to get beyond their current use cases, we needed something that got rid of the penalties for scale (like mint burn fees) and could handle massive volume.
Today's stablecoin use cases are a rounding error against what's coming. with ~$300B in circulation. SWIFT instructs an average of 5 to 6 trillions a day. The card networks settle trillions. Capital markets, QUADRILLIONS. The prize is moving those flows on-chain, 24/7, with the settlement guarantees regulated money actually needs.
If you build payments, capital markets or treasury, this is the rails question of the decade.
Read the design choices first. The logo wall is the easy story.
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Major narrative violation: The big banks ARE doing stablecoins.
@Zelle says it is expanding to India and will launch a stablecoin later this year.
For context: Zelle is the largest P2P money transfer service in the United States, larger than Venmo or Cash App, and built by the large banks.
The parent company Early Warning is owned by seven banks: BofA, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo.
They're launching the app in India but NOT the stablecoin.
This makes sense as India represents the largest outflow of remittances from the US, flowing there.
India is, however, not particularly fond of crypto, so I'm not surprised to see Zelle being more cautious about naming the stablecoin for that corridor.
The @kontigo_app vs Checkbook & JP Morgan drama is pure πΏ.
I wanted to give it some context. Because the claim of "banking system is evil and outdated" is simply wrong and lacks context.
Here's what I think is really going on
JP Morgan closed accounts for crypto startups Kontigo and Blindpay
The information reported that the account freezes were linked to business activity in high-risk regions, including Venezuela, and to gaps in customer identity checks.
From Tradeweb: βJPMorgan acted after seeing rising disputed transactions and chargebacks tied to these accounts. The bank said the decision was based on risk controls, not opposition to stablecoins themselves.β
To understand this, there are a few things we need to unpack:
π§ There are three players here. Checkbook, JP Morgan, and the start-ups themselves.
- JPM banks Checkbook.
- Checkbook "banks" Kontigo.
- Kontigo serves the End User.
EMVCo (the technical body behind Visa, Mastercard, Amex) is creating global standards for "agentic payments."
This is the biggest change in card payments since "tap to pay"
Here's how it works π§΅
Right now, AI agents are phenomenal at finding things to buy.
- Power users are starting to default to their research
- Can compare complex options and summarize
- And when people click through conversion is 2x to 5x higher
But...
There's no agreed way for payment to happen
- There's countless protocols
- x402 for agents accessing other tools
- ACP and A2P from Open AI and Google
- Visa and Mastercard have their own approaches