$One Coin, 140 Owners

On June 30, an independent company called Open Standard launched Open USD (OUSD) with more than 140 backers, a partner list that does not usually share a press release: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Google, Shopify and Ripple among them. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem it with no fees and no volume caps, and most of the income from its reserves flows back to the partners that drive adoption, after a management fee, rather than to a single issuer. Governance sits with a board of members rather than one owner. It is run by Zach Abrams, co-founder of the Stripe-owned stablecoin firm Bridge, and goes live later in 2026 across multiple chains, with Base, Polygon, Solana and Stellar among those named. Circle's stock fell more than 12% on the day. Source.

New York Life Investment Management, which runs about $807 billion, launched its first tokenized fund with Centrifuge: an onchain version of its US high-yield corporate bond strategy (ticker HYB), with subscriptions and redemptions settled in USDC. It is one of the first high-yield credit strategies to come onchain, after a year mostly spent tokenizing Treasuries and private credit. Under a Reg S structure it targets non-US, experienced onchain investors, the buyers Centrifuge describes as stablecoin issuers chasing yield, DeFi users and DAO treasuries. Centrifuge is Coinbase-backed, runs on Ethereum among other chains, and already tokenizes funds for Apollo and Janus Henderson. Source.

Securitize, the BlackRock-backed firm that runs the rails behind products like BlackRock's $3 billion BUIDL fund, is set to begin trading on the NYSE on July 2 under the ticker SECZ, after shareholders approved its merger with the Cantor Equity Partners II blank-check company. It raised roughly $400 million in the deal and becomes the first pure-play tokenization company on a major US exchange. Founded in 2017, Securitize supplies tokenization and transfer-agent infrastructure to BlackRock, Apollo, KKR, Hamilton Lane and VanEck. The listing is a marker for how seriously public markets now price the plumbing under tokenized finance. Source.

Britain's Financial Conduct Authority published its final crypto rulebook on June 30 and cut the capital that stablecoin issuers must hold from a proposed 2% to 1% of the value of tokens in circulation, half of what the EU's MiCA requires. It also eased redemption forecasting and some disclosure obligations, part of what the regulator called a more proportionate regime. This lands a week after the Bank of England dropped its plan to cap how much stablecoin a person could hold, so both UK regulators have now moved the same way, lighter, to stop issuers routing through Europe. Authorizations open September 30, with the regime live in October 2027. Source.

JPMorgan expanded Kinexys, its blockchain deposit network, to support five Asia-Pacific currencies: the Australian and Hong Kong dollars, the yen, the renminbi and the Singapore dollar. They join the US dollar, euro and pound, taking the platform to eight. Kinexys is built for round-the-clock institutional money movement and near-real-time settlement, so corporate and bank clients can move cash and run FX across time zones without waiting for business hours. It is the same theme running under the consortium and the deposit networks: the incumbents would rather move their own regulated money onchain than hand the rails to anyone else. Source.

Last week the prize was the float behind the coin. This week the float got handed to the crowd.

Open USD is 140 of the most powerful companies in payments agreeing, in public, that the interest earned on a stablecoin's reserves should flow to the businesses that move the coin, not to whoever issued it. Read it next to last week's race to manage stablecoin reserves and the picture sharpens.

The money in stablecoins was never really in the token. It sat in the Treasuries behind it, and the distribution layer has now voted to keep that money for itself. I think that is the more durable model, because issuing a coin gives you almost nothing that distribution does not already give you.

What I don't know is whether 140 fierce competitors can govern one thing together. The graveyard is full of consortium money, Libra most of all, and the two coins that actually won, USDT and USDC, won by being somebody's product with a name on the line, not a committee's. So hold both at once: the economics point to the open standard, and the history points to the committee coming apart before it ships.

Privy's Henri Stern on Privacy, Stablecoins and Stripe (Dialectic, with Jackson Dahl).

Henri Stern runs Privy, the wallet-infrastructure company Stripe acquired. It is a long, unhurried conversation on privacy, where the rails are heading, and what Stripe is quietly assembling underneath them.

Good background for the Open USD launch up top. Watch it here.

That’s it for this week.

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James Smith & David Walsh