🤔 What is Open USD?
And why are Circle and Tether so worried?
On today’s menu:
💵 A Brief Guide on OpenUSD
🤔 A Prediction Market for US Consumer Data?
What is OpenUSD?
On June 30, a consortium of 140+ companies — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Google, Coinbase, Shopify, Ripple, Aave, OKX — announced Open USD (OUSD), a new dollar stablecoin designed to do one thing:
Kill Circle’s business model.
Circle’s stock fell 17% the same day, touching a four-month low of $63.85.
Here’s why the market panicked: Circle earns roughly 96% of its revenue from keeping the interest on the reserves backing USDC — about $740 million in a single quarter.
OUSD flips that entirely, distributing nearly all reserve yield back to partner companies, with zero mint and redemption fees and no volume caps.
It’s governed not by a single issuer but by a board of partner companies — structured more like Visa’s network than like a bank.
Led by Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams (Bridge being the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe acquired in 2024), OUSD will launch on Solana first — later in 2026 — then Stellar, Base, and Polygon.
Stripe has already confirmed OUSD will become its default stablecoin for business transactions.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire responded with this:
“Giving away all the income is a recipe for starving an infrastructure, systematically underinvesting and ensuring that your platform will remain limited in scope”.
Why is this so huge?
The main thing here is distribution: stablecoins are mainly used by institutions, and most of the big companies have signed up with OUSD.
That means less interest income for the likes of Tether and Circle.
It remains to be seen if they prefer to use this, or stay with the regulatory licensing, developer integrations, and near-decade long liquidity buildout that USDC has.
You Can Now Trade Bets on What Americans Buy at Walmart
AmericanSpend just launched the first on-chain prediction market for U.S. consumer spending data — letting anyone place bets on economic indicators like retail sales, PCE, and spending category breakdowns before the government releases them.
The idea is clean: economic data releases move markets, and people with good models or real-world data signals should be able to profit from them.
Instead of waiting for a Bloomberg terminal or a hedge fund job, anyone with a wallet can now trade their macro thesis against the crowd.
It’s early — traction is thin and liquidity is still finding its feet — but the concept plugs directly into a much larger wave.
We’re in the middle of a tokenize-everything moment: real estate, carbon credits, T-bills, AI compute time, gold, and now economic data have all found their way onto a blockchain in the last two years.
Some of it is genuinely useful — tokenized T-bills make treasury yields accessible to anyone globally.
Some of it is a solution in search of a problem.
AmericanSpend sits somewhere in between.
The useful version of this is a world where real-time, aggregated consumer behavior from point-of-sale systems feeds into live on-chain markets — creating faster, more accurate signals than government data releases that lag by weeks.
The less useful version is a niche prediction market where ten people trade with each other on PCE estimates.
Which one it becomes depends entirely on whether the data layer gets good enough to make the signal worth trading.
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Degens Only
