Aptos Labs has joined more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, and BlackRock, in backing the launch of Open USD, a new stablecoin designed to solve persistent cost and a
Aptos Labs has joined more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, and BlackRock, in backing the launch of Open USD, a new stablecoin designed to solve persistent cost and access problems in global payments.
Open Standard, the company behind the new stablecoin, unveiled Open USD as an effort to give businesses a more open and cost-effective alternative to existing stablecoins.
The initiative brings together payment giants, major global banks, technology companies, and crypto-native firms including Aptos Labs, Solana, Ripple, and Coinbase.
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Stablecoin adoption has grown rapidly, with transaction volume now approaching that of the ACH network, the system that processes most bank transfers in the United States.
But despite that growth, businesses still face real obstacles. Minting and redeeming most stablecoins becomes prohibitively expensive at high volumes.
Companies using stablecoins typically do not benefit from the revenue generated by the underlying cash reserves backing them. And developers have little recourse if a third-party issuer's roadmap does not align with their needs.
Open USD is built around three core design principles intended to address these gaps directly.
First, businesses can mint and redeem Open USD at no cost, with no artificial caps on volume.
Second, partners receive all of the earnings generated by Open USD's reserves, minus a small management fee to cover operational costs.
Third, the stablecoin will be governed collaboratively through Open Standard, an independent company whose board is made up of Open USD's partners, meaning decisions are made collectively rather than by a single controlling entity.
"Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that's open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests," said Zach Abrams, Founding CEO of Open Standard.
He added, "We're thrilled to bring together over 140 businesses to launch Open USD. It's a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it."
The list of companies backing Open USD spans almost every corner of global finance and technology. Payment networks and processors including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, and Adyen are involved, alongside major global banks such as BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Technology companies including Google, Samsung Electronics, IBM, and Shopify have also signed on, as has a broad swath of the crypto industry — including Aptos Labs, Solana, Coinbase, Ripple, Aave, and Fireblocks.
For Aptos specifically, the involvement places the network's infrastructure arm alongside the most influential names in both traditional finance and crypto, as the industry works toward stablecoin infrastructure designed to serve enterprise-scale use cases rather than niche applications.
Open USD enters a market already dominated by established players like Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC, but its pitch is fundamentally different, rather than being issued and controlled by a single company, it is structured as a shared utility governed by the businesses that rely on it.
Whether that collaborative model proves more attractive to large institutional users than existing stablecoins remains to be seen, but the breadth of the initial partner list, spanning payments, banking, technology, and crypto, signals significant institutional appetite for an alternative approach.
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