140+ companies just announced one together. Here’s what they’re actually after, and what it means for the wallet you hold.
On June 30, 2026, Circle’s share price closed down about 17%. No depeg had happened. No exchange had failed. A group of 140 companies had announced they were building a dollar of their own, and the market immediately repriced what that means for the incumbent.
The group calls itself Open Standard, and the token is Open USD, ticker OUSD. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, and BNY are all in it. The coin has not shipped yet, with native issuance on Solana planned for later this year.
Seven years earlier, several of those names were running the other way. Regulators in the US and Europe called Facebook’s Libra a threat to financial stability in 2019, and Visa and Mastercard walked out of the Libra Association that October. Stripe and eBay left the same week, PayPal a few days earlier. What remained was sold to Silvergate Capital in January 2022 for $182 million, and the token never launched publicly.
What flipped in between is legal, not technical. The GENIUS Act was signed into law in the US on July 18, 2025, giving payment stablecoins a federal definition and establishing rules for issuing them. Those rules take effect in January 2027, though nobody waited. Any bank with federal deposit insurance now has a legal path to minting dollar tokens through a subsidiary. MiCA opened the same door in Europe.
The response was not subtle:
90% of financial institutions have taken action in the segment, from planning through live deployments (OpenFX, 2026)3,473 companies now sit somewhere in the stablecoin value chain, per a July 2026 market map~$313 billion total market cap as of June 30, 2026, close to double the figure from two years earlier (DeFiLlama)Roughly half the banks surveyed by the Fed named digital assets a priority for the next three years
The issuer list left crypto behind a while ago: PayPal (PYUSD), Ripple (RLUSD), MoneyGram (MGUSD), Western Union (USDPT), SoFi (SoFiUSD), JPMorgan (JPMD), Societe Generale (CoinVertible), Deutsche Bank through the AllUnity consortium (EURAU, CHFAU, SEKAU). Japan’s three largest banks agreed to issue a joint token by March 2027.
Which raises a question unrelated to any of these companies. If a hundred different dollars end up in circulation, what happens to the one already sitting in your wallet?
“The first decade of crypto asked who holds the dollar. This one asks whose dollar you’re holding. Issuing another one is easy now. Connecting the ones already out there is the harder problem, and it’s the one users run into every day.”Stefan Lauer, Head of Infrastructure, SimpleSwap
The law opened the door. What walked through it is a set of incentives worth naming.
Reason one: the yield sitting on reserves
The mechanics are plain. An issuer accepts dollars and mints tokens in exchange. That incoming liquidity goes into short-term US Treasuries paying 4% to 5% a year. You get the right to redeem one for one. The issuer keeps the yield.
Tether reported $6.2 billion in net profit for 2023. The figure passed $13 billion in 2024 and was held above $10 billion in 2025.
You don’t need your own token to earn from this. Coinbase booked $305 million in stablecoin revenue in Q1 2026, up from $274 million a year earlier. That line sits inside a subscription and services segment worth 44% of net revenue. The exchange issues nothing of its own. It splits reserve income with Circle under a revenue-share agreement, then pays holders loyalty rewards for parking USDC.
For any company with real payment volume, the math writes itself. Look at the margin going to Tether or Circle, then decide to keep it.
Reason two: owning the rails
Reserve yield explains part of the story. Open Standard stripped mint and redemption fees from the OUSD design entirely and promised to hand most of the reserve income to ecosystem partners. Profit is secondary there. Control over settlement rails is the point.
The same logic applies to companies with no plans to issue anything. On July 9, Hyundai Card moved $20,000 between Hyundai Motor units from the US to Mexico using USDT on Avalanche. The round trip took about seven minutes instead of the three to four hours a correspondent banking route needs. No proprietary token was involved. Working infrastructure was.
Reason three: not living on someone else’s decisions
The third motive gets less airtime. Your own token cuts exposure to another issuer’s freeze decisions and to political pressure aimed at a monopoly. When one issuer serves everybody, its problem becomes everybody’s problem.
What does this cost you?
Here’s where it lands on users. Dozens of tokens, with no shared standard. Fiserv and PayPal announced plans to make FIUSD and PYUSD interoperable back in June 2025, and that pairing is still the headline example. Everything else stays technically and legally separate.
There’s a historical rhyme worth knowing. During the free banking era in the US (1837 to 1863), hundreds of private banks issued their own notes, and each note traded at a discount based on distance from the issuer and trust in its name. The era ended with a single standard imposed by the state.
Until something similar shows up, the work sits with you. Payment arrives in one token while your counterparty accepts another. Neither one lives on the network you actually use.
Swapping is where that gap gets closed. On SimpleSwap you can buy a stablecoin with fiat through partner providers (Mercuryo, Simplex, Guardarian), then swap it for another asset wallet-to-wallet. Underneath, the SimpleSwap exchange aggregates liquidity from 20+ CEX and DEX providers across 2,800+ assets and 3.2M+ trading pairs, with route selection handled in the background.
Your funds don’t sit on the platform between swaps. They leave a wallet you own and arrive at a wallet you own. All costs are included in the quoted rate, so SimpleSwap fees appear before you confirm, not after. Fiat purchases can trigger verification by the payment provider, which is the provider’s requirement rather than a step added by the service. SimpleSwap has been running since 2018, with 10M+ people using it since then.
Where this goes
The market is splitting due to a fight over payment infrastructure, not excess liquidity. Some tokens will stay as settlement tools inside a single ecosystem. Plenty of others will disappear quietly once the novelty wears off.
The on-chain dollar count keeps climbing either way. The question that stays constant is how fast you can move value from one of them into another.
This article was written by SimpleSwap — a self-custodial multi-source swap aggregator. 2,800+ assets, 20+ liquidity providers across CEX and DEX sources, 20M+ swaps since 2018. Wallet-to-wallet by design, with routing handled under the hood.
The information in this article is not a piece of financial advice or any other advice of any kind. The reader should be aware of the risks involved in trading cryptocurrencies and make their own informed decisions. SimpleSwap is not responsible for any losses incurred due to such risks. SimpleSwap’s only official domain is simpleswap.io.
Everyone Wants Their Own Dollar: Why Corporations Are Issuing Stablecoin was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.