Stablecoins are supposed to be better dollars; today they’re often worse. We’re fixing that.

Since announcing Open Standard and Open USD at the beginning of the summer, we’ve received thousands of inquiries from businesses excited to build with us. Over the course of many conversations with current and prospective partners, it’s crystallized just how much businesses need and want a better stablecoin.

Stablecoins are superinfrastructure: they are as stable and reliable as cash, generate strong economics, and move over the internet like any other piece of data. But while today’s stablecoins look and feel like better money, in practice, they’re often worse. Businesses can use stablecoins to store assets, but most can’t or won’t use them to transact—which is largely what they need money to do.

Our partners have brought us a long list of use cases that aren’t technically difficult to address, but remain unsolved due to economic and structural misalignment. Some examples:

• Settlement. Card processors want to be able to use stablecoins for settlement. A merchant would be able to charge a customer, receive their funds, and start deploying those earnings—all in real time, 24/7. The increased velocity of money would meaningfully spur economic growth. But solving card settlement doesn’t help issuers grow their AUM (which drives their revenue), so there’s little incentive for them to invest in it.

• Institutional trading. The NYSE, LSE, CME, Nasdaq, and others all want to enable tokenized trading. Today, traders pledge collateral in the form of dollars. The upside is that they earn interest on the dollars at rest; the downside is that dollars need to move through fiat rails (slowly). Using stablecoins as the primary trading pair would enable traders to be much more agile and efficient in managing their liquidity, especially in volatile markets, but it doesn’t make financial sense until they’re able to access the economics of stablecoins.

• Corporate treasury. Many companies want to put their resting dollars to work. Today, when a business has extra cash, it typically allocates those funds to income-generating securities. With stablecoins, this becomes orders of magnitude faster and easier: you can programmatically move in and out of tokenized money market funds and earn on idle balances even if it’s just for 15 minutes or even 30 seconds. Businesses would love to do this, but can’t because each transaction constitutes an “exit” and costs 5–10 bps. The expense outweighs the benefit.

• Fintech and neobank infrastructure. At Bridge, I worked with many fintechs, from Meow to Slash and Arq. They all want financial infrastructure that can be easily scaled across borders, with lower costs and faster money movement. Stablecoins are the perfect building block for them, but not universally (at least, not yet). In the US, the economics of building with fiat are still better because the fees are fixed and the reserves can be freely invested in money market funds. So most fintechs have opted to painfully run a US/fiat and global/stablecoin business side-by-side, instead of having one unified financial stack.

We started Open Standard to address all of these use cases and more. Our business model will incentivize utility, not AUM. That means:

1. We’ll share as much reserve revenue as possible with participating businesses. Every developer that builds with Open USD will receive a proportionate share of rewards. This is partly common sense—the businesses that grow the pie should be compensated for it—but it also immediately makes Open USD more useful. Businesses can earn rewards equivalent to treasury yields, with the added benefit of instant conversions, at any time of day, for any interval of time.

2. We’ll charge the developer a small fee on transactions. This aligns our business more closely to other payment methods. When you send an ACH payment from one bank to another, 100% of the value lands in the destination account and a tiny fee is charged to the banks. Open Standard will operate similarly. We’ll measure our company’s success based on transaction volume—both how it’s growing and how that growth is compounding.

3. Businesses won’t pay any burn fees—aka “exit” fees—as they do with other stablecoins. Our ambition is to build the most useful stablecoin and that means it should be freely exchangeable for the most global goods and services.

With Open USD, all the use cases I described become possible. Visa, Mastercard, and others will be able to use stablecoins at scale for settlement; institutions will be able to use stablecoins as a trading pair; treasurers will be able to programmatically move into and out of tokenized money market funds when capital is idle for minutes or seconds; neobanks will be able to build much more efficiently; and so much more.

If we’re successful, businesses will be able to use Open USD in every way they want to use fiat today—and they’ll benefit from infrastructure that’s cheaper, faster, more global, and more programmable.

We’re working as quickly as we can toward this reality. If our mission excites you, we’re hiring! DM me (@zcabrams) with a few sentences about why you’re interested in working with us and what you’d most want to work on.