A consortium of more than 140 organizations — including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BNY — announced plans this week to launch Open USD (OUSD), an Ethereum-based stablecoin that lets businesses mint and redeem tokens without fees or volume caps. The project is governed by an independent body called Open Standard, and it distributes earnings across ecosystem partners rather than concentrating reserve income with a single issuer. The move signals another major push by traditional finance giants into the crypto infrastructure layer.
The consortium behind OUSD
Open Standard brings together a who's who of payments and asset management. BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BNY are among the backers, alongside dozens of other firms. The group's structure is designed to avoid the centralization that has drawn regulatory scrutiny to other stablecoin projects. Instead of one company controlling the reserves and collecting all the interest, OUSD spreads the yield among partners. That model could appeal to regulators who have pushed for more transparency and shared governance in the stablecoin market.
What OUSD does differently
Most stablecoins charge fees on minting and redemption, or impose volume limits. OUSD does neither. Businesses can convert dollars to OUSD and back at no cost, with no caps. That's a direct pitch to payment processors and treasury desks that move large sums daily. Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee called the launch a sign of Ethereum's growing role in global finance. The stablecoin runs on Ethereum, which has been under pressure lately — the price is hovering around $1,916, below its 50-day simple moving average.
Ethereum's market context
Ethereum is trading near $1,900, stuck below the $2,000 mark. The key resistance zone sits at $2,200 to $2,300. A close above $2,000 could open a run toward $2,200, then $2,400 to $2,700, according to the bullish case. The base case is consolidation between $1,850 and $2,100. A close below $1,750 would weaken the technical structure. Still, U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs have pulled in about $11.2 billion in cumulative net inflows since launch, with BlackRock's ETHA alone contributing roughly $11.4 billion. That institutional demand, combined with the growing Layer 2 ecosystem, keeps the long-term narrative intact.
Bitcoin Hyper raises $32.9M in presale
In other news, Bitcoin Hyper — a Bitcoin Layer 2 with Solana Virtual Machine integration — raised $32.9 million in its presale. The token is currently priced at $0.0136839, and staking is active. The project's Decentralized Canonical Bridge handles native BTC transfers without relying on wrapped token dependencies, a design that aims to reduce counterparty risk. The presale haul suggests continued appetite for Bitcoin scaling solutions that borrow features from competing ecosystems.
