The announcement of the Open USD (OUSD) stablecoin by a consortium of 140 financial giants including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BlackRock has sparked a debate about the technology’s historical roots. Former Ripple chief engineer Matt Hamilton said the new project structure effectively repeats the architectural solutions built into Ripple. $XRP Ledger 2012 (XRPL).
This comment was prompted by a sarcastic post on X about the emergence of yet another “universal standard” that will only increase the number of competing coins in the market.
2012 concept
According to Hamilton, the original idea for this idea was $XRP The creators of the ledger were based on the prediction that in the future all banks would want to issue their own stablecoins. To ensure interoperability, developers integrated two core features into the network in the early days of the industry: free issuance of custom tokens and a built-in decentralized exchange (DEX) with an automated order book.
Fifteen years ago, the traditional financial sector was not interested in this model. However, current events show that major companies have finally arrived at exactly this approach.
“The original concept behind it is that $XRP The reason Ledger allows anyone to issue stablecoins and includes a DEX is because every bank wants to issue their own stablecoins. Back then, banks weren’t like that. Apparently $XRP Leisure was ahead of this trend by 15 years. ”
— Matt Hamilton, former Ripple Principal Engineer
The launch of Open USD is technically structured so that any company within the consortium can issue its own stablecoin and retain full yield from its reserves. This will lead to the emergence of dozens of new competing tokens from Visa, Stripe, or Coinbase. This is completely in line with old predictions made by XRPL developers.
Ripple joined the project as an integration partner, so the consortium’s new assets will be $XRP ledger. This market evolution highlights just how ahead of its time early blockchain technology really was.
As a result, the built-in exchange and token issuance capabilities built into the network in 2012 have only just begun to enable the original technical task: the exchange of coins issued by multiple independent banks.
