Yesterday saw the arrival of Open USD (OUSD), a new giant competitor to Circle Internet Group, the world’s second-largest stablecoin issuer. $USDC. Behind the financial giant’s fascinating roster was Hyperliquid’s USDH-inspired stablecoin.
OUSD’s list of supporters is long and strong. A profile of the world’s largest payments conglomerate.
It reads as if a crypto investor wished upon a star and all his dreams came true.
Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Google, Samsung Electronics, IBM, Shopify, Western Union, MoneyGram, Coinbase, OKX, Ripple, and metamask It’s all stated in the press release.
The consortium will work together and benefit from interest on the reserves backing OUSD. HyperLiquid popularized this idea of sharing revenue from stablecoin reserves when it launched USDH.
Circle’s common stock fell 17% on Tuesday, wiping out $3.3 billion in market capitalization in less than seven hours.
Behind it was a stablecoin model inspired by Hyperliquid.
How OUSD spent $3.3 billion on Circle in one day
Hyperliquid is an emerging competitor to Binance and other crypto exchanges.
It became a hot topic in the media in 2025 due to controversial features such as influencer-backed copy trading funds, high leverage trading pairs, and decadent leaderboards.
As Hyperliquid grew, we decided to launch our own blockchain and stablecoin USDH.
Employing an unconventional go-to-market strategy, HyperLiquid has decided to deviate from the typical stablecoin model, where the issuer enjoys all of the passive yield from the stablecoin’s reserves.
Instead, Hyperliquid launched a scheme that rewards consortiums that operate USDH together and share passive interest payments.
In much the same way, OUSD is a new stablecoin run by a consortium of over 140 companies. Its economical design takes a page out of Hyperliquid’s USDH playbook.
Open Standard, the organization behind OUSD, does not charge consortium members any fees for minting or redeeming tokens.
Most of the interest earned on U.S. Treasuries is also paid to partners. As the operator, Open Standard only collects a small administration fee.
Centralization of circles $USDCIn contrast, Coinbase maintains the yield on its reserves and shares it with almost everyone other than Coinbase.
The consortium’s stablecoin model, led by Hyperliquid and taken to unimaginable heights by OUSD, is a direct attack on Circle’s business. Investors quickly noticed, sending Circle’s common stock into a panic yesterday.
The harvest is in the moat
Operating a stablecoin is one of the most profitable endeavors in the cryptocurrency industry.
Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, claims to have one of the highest revenues per employee on the planet.
Stablecoin issuers only need to hold risk-free U.S. Treasuries with a yield of around 4% in reserve. Customers hold non-yielding tokens. The issuer pockets all the interest.
in $USDCThe current supply is about $73 billion, so its annual profit equates to about $2.7 billion per year.
Cryptocurrency trader Luke Cannon immediately recognized the structure of OUSD. “This is essentially the USDH proposal, except instead of Agora, Paxos, and Native Markets, it’s Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, Blackrock, Google, Samsung, IBM, and Western Union,” he noted.
Why is Tether 213% bigger than Circle but 8,000% more profitable?
Hyper Liquid wrote the script in September.
In September 2025, Hyperliquid launched a governance vote. The validator has chosen USDH, the exchange’s native dollar token issuer.
Bidders included Paxos, Ethena, Agora, Frax and Sky. Each bidder competed by offering a larger share of the reserve yield to the hyperliquid ecosystem.
Native Markets, which entered in partnership with Stripe, proposed a 50/50 split. Paxos promised 95%. Agora is 100% committed.
Open Standards also frames OUSD in similar terms.
The launch article argues that “existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to leverage them at scale, companies need something that is open, low-cost, high-throughput, widely accessible, and aligned with their interests.”
Translated into plain English, it means that the financial giants will share in OUSD’s interest payments, please and thank you.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire tried to quell the panic yesterday, but to little effect. “$USDC remains the world’s most trusted, widely adopted, institutionally ready stablecoin. ”
CRCL closed at $62.63, down from its previous close of $75.96. Volume reached 37.5 million shares, which is 2.7 times the daily average.
After losing over 17% of its value during yesterday’s trading, the stock is currently 76% below its 52-week high.
