Ninety-one per cent on the chain Stripe built

Open Standard announced on Wednesday that its dollar stablecoin, Open USD, was live. Its own post sets out the arrangement. Businesses can mint and redeem the token one for one against the dollar, at no cost, through four routes: BVNK, which Mastercard owns, Stripe and the Visa Stablecoin Platform from launch day, and Coinbase from today. The token runs natively on Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo. It is "issued by Bridge, a Stripe company", with reserves at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY, and Bridge will publish monthly attestations.

Bridge's reserve page already carries a running total. At 13:50 UTC on Thursday it showed 468,458,763 OUSD in circulation against reserves of the same amount: 12 per cent cash and 88 per cent Treasuries, a category it says includes money-market funds holding bills of under three months. What the page does not show is where those tokens are.

The ledgers do. Open Standard published a contract address for each chain, and this desk read the supply recorded at each one a few minutes after Bridge's update. Tempo held 425.2 million. Solana held 18.0 million, Base 15.0 million and Ethereum 10.2 million. The four add up to within a few hundred tokens of Bridge's figure. Just under 91 per cent of the new dollar is on Tempo, and barely 2 per cent on Ethereum, the chain where most of the stablecoin market has grown up.

Tempo is the payments blockchain that Stripe backs. Its chief business officer, Dan Romero, told CoinDesk that he saw a path to about $1 billion of OUSD on Tempo within a few months and more than $10 billion during 2027, and that Tempo means to be the token's deepest pool of liquidity. A day into trading it already is, with more than twenty times the supply of the next chain.

This matters because neutrality is the product. Open Standard's pitch is a dollar owned by the companies that use it. Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa each took an equal initial stake and between them committed more than $1 billion to seed supply. More than 200 partners earn rewards in proportion to the supply and activity they drive. The chief executive, Zach Abrams, a co-founder of Bridge, told CoinDesk that the "overwhelming majority" of the equity will be handed out over four to five years on the same basis. On the first day's evidence, one founder owns the issuer, runs one of the four routes in, and backs the chain that holds nine of every ten tokens.

That is not proof of anything improper, and the ledger cannot show which partner minted which tokens: a token on Tempo may have come in through any route. Seed money tends to land where its owner operates. Coinbase's route opens today, and Base is Coinbase's chain, with 15 million OUSD at the time of reading. Whether that number moves over the next few weeks will be the plainest public sign of how evenly the founders are behaving.

Set against the market, the total is small. The Paypers, citing Spark's tracker of DefiLlama data, put stablecoin supply at about $308 billion in August, with Tether's USDT on roughly 59 per cent and Circle's USDC on about 23. OUSD's 468 million is about 0.15 per cent, though it is close to half of the founders' commitment within a day. Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase have said they will keep supporting other stablecoins, USDC among them. Coinbase, the largest distributor of USDC and a recipient of some of its reserve income, now also holds an equal stake in its newest competitor.