HTX Ventures Examines Open USD: How Stablecoin Revenue and Rule-Setting Are Being Redistributed
APIA, Samoa, Aug. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — HTX Ventures, the global investment arm of HTX, has released a new report titled Open Infrastructure, Closed Financial Rails: Open USD, Revenue Redistribution, and Participant Governance, examining the shifts underway in stablecoin revenue distribution, channel relationships, and governance following the June 30, 2026 unveiling of Open USD (OUSD).
The report finds that while blockchain technology has established open, global, and programmable technical infrastructure, the industry’s next phase will be determined by how participants contest control rights and the allocation of economic benefits. The technical layer has opened; the economic layer is only beginning to.
Closed Economic Structures atop Open Technology
Stablecoins have moved from settlement tools within crypto trading into instruments for cross-border payments, corporate treasury management, and institutional back-office clearing. Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot reached an annualized run rate of approximately $7 billion by April 2026 across nine blockchains, while Swift, the Canton Network, Fnality, and Project Agorá explore how tokenized deposits and central bank money can settle within shared environments.
Economic rights, however, remain distributed along established lines. Issuers mint stablecoins against user dollars and allocate reserves into cash and short-term Treasuries, with reserve yields accruing solely to them. Yet the system depends on exchanges and wallets for user access, payment companies to connect merchants, banks for fiat on/off-ramps, custodians for reserves, and market makers for secondary depth. These institutions bear integration, compliance, and liquidity costs, and currently capture revenue mainly through bilateral commercial agreements — where bargaining power depends heavily on their own user scale.
Three Institutional Shifts in OUSD’s Design
Under Open Standard’s framework, enterprises can mint and redeem OUSD free of charge and without volume limits. Open Standard charges a small management fee, with the remaining reserve yields earmarked for partners who adopt and promote OUSD, as well as select partners planning to join its board of directors. The published partner roster exceeds 140 entities, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, and BNY.
HTX Ventures breaks the design into three shifts:
- From fee-based access to subsidized distribution, using reserve yields to offset the genuinely expensive investments in customer acquisition, liquidity, regional compliance, and fiat rails;
- From bilateral negotiations to network-wide revenue sharing, bringing mid-sized payment companies, regional banks, and vertical wallets into a unified framework where partners share revenue based on contribution;
- From issuer governance to participant governance, giving institutions that bear business and regulatory responsibility a voice in rule-making.
OUSD is slated for launch later in 2026. Notably, it shares the OUSD code with Origin Protocol’s Origin Dollar, launched in 2020, though the two are distinct products.
Execution Details Will Determine Whether the Model Holds
According to HTX Ventures, the model’s viability depends on several specific mechanisms. Revenue-sharing rules directly determine who captures value: allocation by balance favors institutions with greater capital resources, while allocation by transaction volume can be distorted by internal transfers that generate activity without real payments. A workable mechanism would weigh balance retention, actual payments, new customers, and regional compliance investments together. The governance arrangement likewise rests on what the board can actually decide, not on how many institutions appear on the roster.
More fundamentally, a considerable distance separates joining a consortium from migrating core business. What ultimately determines network value is stable balances, real payment volume, market-making depth, and smooth redemptions.
Value Chain Revenue Faces Redistribution
If revenue-sharing models generate sustained payment volumes, the room for issuers to retain the full reserve yield spread will narrow. Exchanges, wallets, and payment companies that control access to users, liquidity, and payment use cases may shift from distribution tools to participants in revenue-sharing and governance arrangements. For banks the impact is two-sided — deposits and correspondent banking revenue may erode, but stablecoins still require reserve custody, fiat on/off-ramps, and FX liquidity. Card networks face limited direct impact, given their role in authorization, fraud management, and merchant acceptance. Across clearing, custody, and data services, fees based on proprietary records may decline while services tied to security and liability expand.
The Next Dimension of Competition
Open USD raises a question that extends beyond stablecoins: when banks, payment processors, exchanges, asset managers, and custodians provide the underlying assets, customer relationships, liquidity, and compliance capabilities, how will the value chain distribute profits and control?
Such shifts are most likely in middle- and back-office infrastructure, where multiple institutions are required and no single platform can independently provide customer reach, regional licensing, fiat rails, and counterparty networks. Institutions need shared infrastructure, yet remain reluctant to cede core operations, client data, and risk authority to a direct competitor. Consortium governance and revenue sharing are therefore not ideological commitments to decentralization, but pragmatic commercial prerequisites for cross-institutional networks.
HTX Ventures notes that along this trajectory, stablecoin competition will move beyond issuance scale and on-chain liquidity toward who contributes network value, who shares infrastructure revenue, who retains customers and data, and who sets operating rules. The next generation of financial infrastructure need not be fully decentralized; more likely, it evolves from single-company control toward networks where regulated participants connect, share returns, and govern major decisions through tiered arrangements. As a research and investment firm with a long-standing focus on payment infrastructure and institutional settlement networks, HTX Ventures will continue tracking how this redistribution of revenue, customers, and rule-setting shapes the industry’s direction.
About HTX Ventures
HTX Ventures is the global investment arm of HTX, integrating investment, incubation, and research to identify and discover the best and most innovative projects in the market. Visit us here.
