Asked about stablecoin competition on Visa’s July 28 earnings call, CEO Ryan McInerney gave a familiar answer.

“Our role is not to pick winners,” he said.

Visa holds a seat on the board of the company issuing Open USD, a consortium whose stated terms return reserve earnings to member businesses. It is also giving Open USD the first integration on its new institutional stablecoin platform.

Those facts sit awkwardly beside the quote. Visa may have no view on which stablecoin wins, and it has taken a position in one.

TL;DR

  • Visa sits on Open Standard’s partner board, which returns reserve revenue to members.
  • Open USD hands nearly all reserve income to partners, attacking the model behind USDT and USDC.
  • Circle shares fell as much as 17% on the announcement; certain exchange joined despite earning $908m from USDC in 2024.

What Visa Actually Holds in Open USD

Open USD launched in June from Open Standard, an independent company with more than 140 participating businesses including Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Google, Shopify, certain exchange and Ripple. Zach Abrams, co-founder of the Stripe-owned infrastructure firm Bridge, is founding CEO.

The governance structure is the point. Open Standard’s board is drawn from its partner companies rather than controlled by a single issuer, and members receive revenue based on the stablecoin’s adoption alongside technical and integration support. Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, confirmed the membership publicly on X.

Visa has not disclosed its own arrangement, and those are the consortium’s published terms for members generally. Taken at face value, they give Visa three positions at once: a governance seat, an economic interest in adoption, and control of a distribution channel through the Visa Stablecoin Platform, now in beta with selected clients.

VSP combines onchain wallets, bank connectivity and institutional controls in a Visa-managed environment, letting clients mint, redeem, hold and transfer supported stablecoins using passkeys, transfer allow lists, audit logs and dual approval. It begins with Open USD.

Visa’s wider network genuinely is multi-coin. Its existing settlement infrastructure supports USDC, PYUSD, USDG and EURC across several chains, and nothing stops Visa adding those tokens to VSP later. The difference is that Visa earns nothing when USDC grows.

The Attack Is on Revenue, Not Technology

Fiat-backed issuers take in dollars when tokens are minted and invest the backing in Treasury bills and short-term instruments. The interest belongs to the issuer while holders get a token worth about $1.

The scale of that is not marginal. Tether reported over $10 billion in net profit for 2025 and roughly $1.04 billion in Q1 2026. Circle’s first-quarter filing showed $652.5 million in reserve income, equal to 94% of total revenue.

Open USD inverts it. Businesses mint and redeem without fees or volume caps, and nearly all reserve earnings flow to participating partners after a management fee.

Markets read the implication immediately. Circle shares fell as much as 17% on the announcement, and certain exchange joined the consortium despite receiving $908 million in USDC revenue sharing from Circle during 2024. A distribution partner that large moving to a competing arrangement is the clearest signal of where the economics point.

Revenue sharing itself is not new, since Circle already pays substantial distribution costs to certain exchange, certain exchange and others. Open USD’s difference is making it a founding principle across 140 companies rather than a bilateral concession negotiated after a token reaches scale. Every member has a direct financial reason to push the token inside its own products.

What the Coalition Still Cannot Buy

As of July 30, DefiLlama placed USDT at roughly $183.8 billion and USDC at $72.2 billion, together about 83% of the $308.2 billion stablecoin market.

That supply underpins thousands of trading pairs, DeFi pools, payment services, lending markets and cross-chain routes. Large positions move because market makers and redemption channels already exist, tested through several volatile cycles.

Open USD has none of it. Partner commitments cannot substitute for supply in circulation, exchange depth or a record of honouring redemptions under stress, and a signed agreement is some distance from a live product moving customer balances.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire’s response, which rested on exactly that: stablecoin networks derive power from liquidity and integrations accumulated over years. Coming from the executive most exposed to the threat, it is a self-interested argument that happens to describe a real barrier.

We’ve had lots of questions from our investor community looking for thoughts on OUSD, and so I thought I’d share my direct views here for anyone.

Stablecoin networks are platform and network effect businesses that are established over a long period of time, tend towards…

— Jeremy Allaire – jerallaire.arc (@jerallaire) July 1, 2026

Where That Leaves the Incumbents

McInerney’s answer holds on its own terms. Visa’s strongest commercial outcome is owning the infrastructure through which every digital dollar reaches banks, merchants and consumers, whichever token wins.

The board seat points somewhere more specific. Visa is one of 140 companies with a stake in Open USD’s growth, several of which are its direct competitors in payments, and it has given that token the opening slot on a platform designed to embed a stablecoin into institutional treasury workflows.

The threat to Tether and Circle was never an unlaunched token. It is a coalition of the largest distributors in payments and banking being paid to grow one, with Visa among them.