(Updates with response from Freedom Bank Kazakhstan in eighth paragraph.)
Updated: Days after Open Standard unveiled Open USD (OUSD) on 30 Jun with a roster of about 140 named partners, questions are widening over how many of those companies signed on to actual issuance, how many to lighter roles.
Shares of Circle, the US issuer of the USDC stablecoin, fell 18% on the day and have stayed near those lows since, pricing in what markets read as the first credible multi-issuer challenge to the Tether (USDT)–USDC duopoly since Facebook's Libra in 2019. Reporting in Seoul, corporate responses to Sandmark now suggest the debut roster and the working consortium are not the same list.
Korean outlet Chosun Biz initially reported on 3 Jul that a Samsung Electronics official said the South Korean electronics group had had no official consultations with Open Standard and did not know what role it would play. An updated version of the article, timestamped the next day, replaced the Samsung attribution with a reference to an unnamed official at a major domestic company.
Shinhan Financial Group, the South Korean bank; Dunamu, the operator of the Upbit crypto exchange; and K Bank, a South Korean internet bank, remain named in the current version as having told Chosun Biz that Open Standard had asked whether they would participate, and they had responded only that they would review the proposal. Their names appeared as partners nevertheless.
Dunamu told Sandmark it had indicated potential willingness to consider participating in the future expansion of the Open Standard ecosystem, but was not participating in issuance of the dollar stablecoin. Several Korean industry executives told local media that participation at this stage amounts to a seat at a standards-setting forum, not a decision to issue.
The Digital Asset Basic Act, expected to authorize won-pegged stablecoins, has been delayed by an unresolved split. Ruling party lawmakers have pushed to allow non-bank issuers, while the Bank of Korea and the government have both argued issuance should be limited to banks. That framework is why domestic partners have been careful with their language.
Interest itself is not in doubt: Samsung Electronics did not respond to a request for comment from Sandmark, but its venture arm Samsung Next in 2025 invested in Rain, a US stablecoin card infrastructure firm named on the Open Standard partner list.
Outside Korea, the responses to Sandmark included an outright denial: Freedom Bank Kazakhstan said it had "no official relationship" with Open Standard. Most other partners, however, were broadly divided along two lines.
Some described a specific role that stops short of issuance. Trust Wallet, a self-custody crypto wallet, told Sandmark it was participating as an infrastructure integrator and had consented to being listed, pointing to its own announcement on X on 30 Jun.
Bitget Wallet, the wallet arm of crypto exchange Bitget, said it was building an "account layer" role and would treat OUSD as part of the dollar infrastructure its users transact with, "beyond any single coin." A payments firm that spoke to Sandmark on background said it had signed up to list OUSD and enable deposits and withdrawals, but had made no determination on issuance.
Others confirmed being listed but described the specifics as still to be settled. PayPay, the Japanese mobile payments operator, said it had agreed to be named but the role was not yet determined. Absa, the South African banking group, said its relationship was in "early stages" and it intended to work "alongside them and our regulators" to develop solutions for African clients.
Singaporean lender DBS; Australia's largest lender by assets, Commonwealth Bank of Australia; and Japanese e-commerce group Rakuten confirmed participation without describing themselves as issuers. Of the non-US partners that responded, none affirmed a role in issuing OUSD.
The clearest commitments to issue OUSD have come from a single quarter. Open Standard is positioned as an independent company whose board will be drawn from partners, but its direction is distinctly Stripe-adjacent.
The founding CEO of the consortium, Zach Abrams, is also co-founder and CEO of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Stripe acquired for roughly $1.1bn in one of the largest acquisitions in crypto history. The two other named members in Open Standard, Eric Weingarten and Ben O'Neill, also hold senior roles in Bridge.
Stripe and Tempo, the payments blockchain incubated by Stripe, are included in the partner list, as is Bridge itself.
Open USD's pitch also closely mirrors one Bridge has already made. In September 2025, Bridge introduced Open Issuance, a platform that lets any business mint its own stablecoin, keep the reserve yield and swap one-for-one with other stablecoins on the network. Open USD's three design principles – fee-free minting and redemption, reserve earnings shared with partners and collaborative governance – offer similar capabilities.
Stripe did not respond to a request for comment on the extent of its involvement in the governance of Open Standard.
OUSD is scheduled to debut in the second half of 2026. Open Standard has not published a governance framework or specified how partner roles will be defined ahead of that date.
