Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined again by James Wester (co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research), who I’ve come to think of as our resident stablecoin correspondent to make sense of the biggest stablecoin news of the summer.
In July, Stripe organized a consortium called Open Standard, backed by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Coinbase, among others, to launch a dollar-backed stablecoin called OUSD. Within days, some of the smaller companies on that list said they hadn’t agreed to what was being described. There’s still no white paper, nor clarity on governance.
So, what’s the Open Standard consortium building?
We dig into:
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What’s confirmed about Open Standard and OUSD, and what’s still guesswork
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Why this fight is about platform ambition as opposed to stablecoin tech (Circle’s site hails itself as “the tech stack for the agentic economy” without mentioning stablecoin; that platform ambition may be why the rest of the payments industry is organizing against it)
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Why payments consortiums almost always fail, and what Zelle (one of the rare successes) had that Open Standard currently doesn’t
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Why nobody’s panicking about OUSD the way central bankers panicked over Facebook’s Libra in 2019, and what that reveals about stablecoin regulation
Tune in for James’s read on whether Open Standard becomes infrastructure or the next entry in the consortium graveyard.
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