Cross-border payments are being rebuilt in real time — and the question is no longer whether stablecoins will play a role in that shift, but who will control the infrastructure and under what rules. Two developments from the past two weeks make that shift impossible to ignore.
On 30 June, Open Standard — a newly formed entity led by founding CEO Zach Abrams, previously co-founder of Bridge — launched Open USD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by more than 140 companies. Unlike Tether’s USDT or Circle’s USDC, Open USD is governed by a board made up of its partner businesses rather than a single issuer. The partner list spans payments (Visa, Mastercard, American Express), banking (BlackRock, BNY, BBVA), technology (Google, Shopify, DoorDash) and crypto infrastructure (Coinbase, Ripple, Solana).
The economic model is the more interesting part: fee-free minting and redemption, no volume caps, and reserve earnings shared across the partner network instead of retained by a single company. Every participating business has a direct incentive to route volume through Open USD — the more it is used, the larger the pool of earnings shared among the companies driving that usage.
The market reacted immediately: Circle’s shares fell more than 17% on the day of the announcement, as investors priced in a credible challenge to USDC’s dominance from a coalition that includes several of Circle’s own institutional partners. Open USD is expected to go live later in 2026, issued natively on Solana with integrations across Stellar, Base and Polygon.
Days later, Bridge — the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe acquired in 2024 — secured a Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorisation under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and an Electronic Money Institution licence in Luxembourg, giving it a single regulatory passport across all 27 EU member states.
The timing is not incidental: the approval landed days after MiCA’s final transition phase took full effect on 1 July, a deadline that already forced platforms like Coinbase, Kraken and Crypto.com to remove USDT after Tether chose not to seek MiCA authorisation.
With its dual licence, Bridge can now let EU businesses issue their own euro-backed stablecoins and offer named IBANs across the entire bloc through a single integration — no more country-by-country banking relationships.
Together, these stories point to the same shift from two directions.
Stablecoins are consolidating around institutions, not away from them. The Open USD partner list is dominated by the same banks and payment networks that run the existing correspondent banking system — this is traditional finance absorbing stablecoin rails, not being disrupted by them.
Regulation is becoming the differentiator, not the obstacle. Bridge’s move into Luxembourg shows the companies building next-generation payment infrastructure are racing to be first through the regulatory door.
Value is shifting toward the ecosystem, not just the issuer. Open USD’s revenue-sharing model and Bridge’s removal of banking friction both point to a market where value is distributed across participants rather than captured by one company alone.
For companies like Magma Finance, these are not abstract headlines — they describe the environment we operate in.
At Magma Finance, we see this as validation of an approach we’ve consistently taken: building international payment services around proper regulatory oversight, not around it. The firms treating licensing as a shortcut will increasingly lose ground to those treating it as the foundation.
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