A month or so ago the consortium Open Standard announced OUSD, a stablecoin backed by Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, BBVA, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Google, plus more than 140 other firms. As a reminder, the members can mint and redeem without fees, while most of the reserve income gets distributed back to participants, and the coin will be natively issued on Tempo, the payments chain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm.
All of the coverage I read over the last month treated this as a challenger story, a coalition going after Tether’s $184 billion and Circle’s $73 billion. And I think thats probably a fair assessment as far as it goes. But I’d like to spend some time on why the most sophisticated payments companies on earth looked at the existing stablecoin stack, built on public blockchains that nobody controls, and then concluded that the money they intend to move should be issued on a chain they do control. Now I think if you reframe it like that, then OUSD feels more a governance statement than a product announcement.
That then makes me wonder if this might be the clearest evidence yet of a trade that I think is restructuring the tokenization of money. I’m going to call it the neutrality trade. So what I mean by that is every serious issuer of digital dollars is now deciding how much credible neutrality to sell in exchange for operational control. The direction of travel looks like its one way to me. And when you think about it in the history of payment networks, it may give us some clues to both why they’re doing it and why the destination probably isn’t where we think.
Why the issuers are leaving
Stablecoins grew up on Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, chains whose defining feature is that no single party can censor a transaction, halt the network, or change the rules. That neutrality is what lets two offshore issuers distribute digital dollars to every wallet on the planet without asking anyone’s permission. In 2025, stablecoins settled around $33 trillion in raw volume. Strip out the bots and wash activity and estimates of real economic flow range from Visa’s figure of roughly $10 trillion to Artemis’s estimate closer to $28 trillion. Whichever adjustment you believe, or choose to believe, there’s no doubt that permissionless distribution on neutral rails built a settlement system of real scale in under a decade.
But an issuer running institutional money on a neutral chain finds themselves in a bit of an uncomfortable position as they’re legally responsible for a liability whose availability they cannot actually guarantee. An issuer can control its smart contract, it can control its upgrade keys, it can controls its freeze list etc. But what it can’t control is whether the chain underneath processes transactions at all, or what the fees will be on a volatile day, or how the validator set behaves under, say, political pressure. And that last one is not hypothetical. After OFAC sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022, the share of Ethereum blocks built to exclude sanctioned transactions climbed, at its peak, to roughly 75% of the network. As it turns out, the censorship resistant chain contains a great deal of voluntary censorship, and I expect the lesson institutions took from the episode is that neutrality on a public chain is actually more an emergent behavior of other peoples incentives than any service level agreement.
So naturally the issuers are building their own tracks. Tempo targets over 100k TPS, it has no native token, and lets its users pay gas in stablecoins. Circle is building Arc, where USDC itself is the gas token, with mainnet expected this year. Tether is behind Plasma, already live and moving USDT with gas fees sponsored by the network. Every one of these chains keeps all the technical bits of crypto with the blocks, the validators, the EVM compatibility, and then it removes the thing crypto was invented to provide. The issuer, or a consortium of the issuers friends, runs the validators, controls the upgrade path, and can guarantee liveness the same way a bank guarantees uptime on its payment gateway.
Now for many institutional buyers this is a sign of the product finally becoming fit for purpose. A treasurer wants a named counterparty with an SLA and a throat to choke, and not many have censorship resistance at the top of their requirements list.
What neutrality was actually doing
But before anyone rushes to the conclusion that neutral chains are gonna lose, its probably worth looking at what neutrality does economically, because to be clear this ain’t just about ideology.
The thing to remember is that neutrality provides a distribution subsidy. As far as I’m aware, Tether has never negotiated access to a single market it operates in, the chain does the distributing. Any exchange, wallet, or protocol anywhere can integrate USDT without a commercial agreement, which is why a Buenos Aires merchant and a Lagos importer hold the same instrument as a Chicago trading firm. Neutrality is also like an anti holdup guarantee. Build your business on Ethereum and no one can reprice your access, revoke your API keys, or favor their product over yours in the sequencing queue. And for sure composability, the ability of any application to plug into any asset without permission, is a large part of what got the developers got so excited.
Move to a chain owned by your competitor and I think you have to ask whether every one of those things will end up inverting? If you’re a fintech considering Tempo, the nagging thought you probably can’t shake is that Stripe is a design partner of the rail and you are not. The history of platforms is not kind to businesses built on infrastructure their competitor controls. Its like the neutral chains solved that problem so well that everyone has now forgot it was a problem.
To be fair, the crypto native crowd probably swings the pendulum a bit too far the other way and treats neutrality as unconditional. Say what you like about SWIFT, but it spent fifty years looking like the textbook neutral utility, a member owned cooperative connecting more than 11 000 institutions, governed by no single state or shareholder. Then in 2022 it disconnected Russian banks within weeks. So neutrality holds right up until sufficiently powerful stakeholders need it not to, and Ethereum’s OFAC episode is basically the same thing, albeit in a different setting. So yeah if we’re honest with ourselves, no payment network at scale has ever been truly neutral. What the durable ones do is distribute control widely enough that no ordinary participant needed to worry about it.
In my mind, the choice is never really neutrality versus control. It’s whose control, exercised through what governance and visible to whom.
We have seen this movie before, and it’s called Visa
Alright indulge me for a moment with some Visa history, because I reckon its probably the best precedent for whats happening comes from the card networks, over fifty years before anyone ever uttered the word blockchain.
BankAmericard began in 1958 as a single banks proprietary product. Bank of America owned the brand, ran the rules, and then franchised the program to other banks, who chafed at building volume on a rail their largest competitor controlled. The franchise model produced exactly what you or I might predict with distrust, underinvestment, and operational chaos in interchange. The fix came in 1970, when Dee Hock persuaded Bank of America to give up ownership entirely. Control passed to National BankAmericard Inc, a non stock membership corporation owned by the participating banks which was deliberately structured so no single bank could dominate it. It was then rebranded Visa in 1977. The biggest insight that built the largest payment network on earth was that a rail scales when its most important users are its owners, because no bank wants to route its future over a competitors rail.
Ok so now lets look at OUSD again. An independent governance entity, no mint or redemption fees for members, reserve income distributed to participants, and a 140 firms, including direct competitors like Visa and Mastercard, taking shared ownership of an instrument none of them individually controls. That feels pretty damn close to the historical playbook. You might convince me that the single issuer chains like Arc and Plasma are in the franchise phase. So come build your business on my rail, and you can trust me not to abuse it. I think they likely hit the same wall the BankAmericard franchise hit, because the incentive problem feels identical to me, even if its only fifty years older than the technology.
Of course, the problem with this analogy is that when Hock mutualized BankAmericard the network already existed. Thousands of licensee banks were issuing, there were lots of merchants signed, millions of cardholders were transacting, with proper volume clearing through the system every day. Actually what mutualization fixed was the governance of a machine that had already proved it worked. OUSD is running the sequence in reverse, mutualizing a membership list and hoping that the network then follows. The volume it needs is currently settling in USDT and USDC on chains its members don’t control, and I doubt 140 logos on a launch page is gonna move that on its own. We’ve seen that version of the movie too. Diem assembled Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and PayPal behind a consortium stablecoin in 2019, every one of them had quit within months, and the project was sold for parts by 2022. Talking to bankers looking at the tokenized deposit consortiums it’s clear that consortium membership provides cheap optionality, but routed volume is different, thats actual commitment. They’re different beasts, even when a press release makes them look identical.
What OUSD has of course that Diem didn’t is a post GENIUS legal framework. There’s no Facebook at the center attracting regulatory fire, and what looks like a genuine economic answer to the freerider problem, since members earn reserve income on the balances they bring. Whether that’s enough to make Stripe route real payment flow onto it, rather than hedge, is likely going to be the real test. The thing to watch for is the settled volume, rather than any logo wall.
The Visa story has another twist to it. The member owned cooperative eventually converted into a for profit corporation and went public in 2008, in what was then the largest IPO in US history. The rail that was mutualized to escape one owner’s control ended up owned by shareholders and charging everyone! Mutualization in payments tends to be a phase where it builds the trust a network needs to reach scale, and then gets discarded once the network has pricing power.
Where the trade settles
So where does this all go? I think it likely resolves into a barbell, which won’t surprise anyone who has watched whats happening to US banking in general.
At one end, controlled rails will end up winning institutional flow. Citi moves nearly $6 trillion in payments a day, and Citi Token Services runs tokenized settlement entirely inside the banks perimeter, where I suspect clients neither know nor care what the ledger is. Visa’s own stablecoin settlement pilot has reached a $7 billion annualized run rate, small but it looks like its growing 50% a quarter, all of it on Visa terms. Corporate treasurers, regulated funds, and banks will transact on rails where liveness is a contract and the operator is accountable, and then the consortium model, OUSD or whatever follows it, is how those rails get the multi party trust that I expect single issuer chains will struggle to offer.
At the other end, neutral chains keep the flows that exist exactly because no one can control them. So cross border dollar demand in weak currency economies, markets that consortium compliance departments are never gonna approve, and the open composability of the DeFi stack. I think it’s a mistake to write that off as just some niche. Its most of the bot adjusted volume today, and its really the demand that made stablecoins matter in the first place.
The battle is for the middle earth of payments, so the fintechs, PSPs, and mid market corporates who could probably go either way. If I were to predict, I’d say they’ll end up multi homing, the way merchants take Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex and the way issuers already deploy on five chains at once. And multi homing may mean the chains themselves capture less value than everyone building them may believe. If the same OUSD or USDC moves interchangeably across Tempo, Arc, and Ethereum, the chain becomes the commodity and the chokepoints move up the stack, to the mint and redemption relationship, the compliance layer, and to the governance table where the rules get written. When I think about investing in this space, the screen I apply is who holds a seat that can’t be routed around when the network reorganizes? I think that matters more than which chain posts the biggest throughput number. TPS has never really been a moat in payments, and Visa didn’t win on speed.
The last 25 years in this industry has taught me that rails are never really neutral and never really fully owned. They tend to sit wherever the current balance of power among their biggest users puts them, and they end up moving when that balance moves. I’m sure the stablecoin chains launching today are opening positions, not end states. Dee Hock genius was he understood the endgame in 1970, and I don’t think it has changed since then.
Nobody trusts a rail owned by their competitor, and nobody scales a rail owned by no one. Everything else is negotiation.
References
OUSD and purpose-built chains
Visa, Stripe, Coinbase and more join Open USD stablecoin that shares reserve revenue — The Block
The Rise of Stablechains: Plasma, Arc, & Tempo Explained — Across
Volumes and market data
Stablecoins Process More Than Visa: Inside the $33 Trillion Payment Revolution — BlockEden
Stablecoins Just Out-Processed Visa. Now What? — Forbes, April 2026
Visa Accelerates Stablecoin Momentum: Adding Five Blockchains for Settlement — Visa
Incumbent rails and history