Visa and Mastercard back OUSD, a stablecoin that could cut into their own business

Visa and Mastercard have spent decades as the toll booths of global commerce. Now they’ve co-funded a road that might go around them. Both card networks are founding partners in Open Standard, the group behind OUSD (Open USD), a dollar-pegged stablecoin that officially launched on September 30, 2026. They hold equal equity stakes alongside Coinbase, Shopify and Stripe. Together, the five founders have committed over $1 billion to back the token’s liquidity. Forbes framed the move as a bet on a product that could eat into the card giants’ own business. That tension is the most interesting part of the story. What OUSD actually is The token went live on four blockchains at once: Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo. That multichain approach means a business doesn’t have to pick a single network to plug into. Businesses can mint OUSD at a 1:1 ratio against US dollars and redeem it the same way. There are no fees and no volume limits on either side of that exchange. The reserves backing each token sit with BlackRock, BNY and Lead Bank. Open Standard publishes attestations of those reserves every month, giving holders a regular check that the dollars are actually there. Issuance runs on infr...