Key Takeaways:
Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin lost about 146 million tokens in a series of burns on the XRP Ledger on Tuesday, reducing its circulating supply to roughly $1.4 billion, as a new consortium-backed stablecoin called Open USD draws support from more than 140 companies including Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase.
The burns, executed within hours on June 30, cut RLUSD's market capitalization by roughly 10 percent from its prior level, according to CoinGecko data. Ripple launched RLUSD in late 2024 as a regulated dollar stablecoin issued on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. The token had built a market cap of about $1.55 billion before the reduction.
The timing coincides with the emergence of Open USD, or OUSD, a stablecoin unveiled by Open Standard with backing from a consortium that spans traditional finance, big tech and crypto. The list includes BlackRock, BNY, Google, Shopify, Stripe, Coinbase, Fireblocks and Solana, among others. Open Standard, an independent entity led by interim CEO Zach Abrams — who co-founded Bridge, the stablecoin firm Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2025 — will issue and operate the token.
"Open USD will be the default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe," Will Gaybrick, president of technology and business at Stripe, said in the announcement.
The consortium model targets the two biggest pain points for enterprise stablecoin users: minting and redemption fees, and the distribution of reserve earnings. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem OUSD for free, and the yield generated by the underlying cash reserves will be shared among partners after a small fee. That structure directly challenges the business models of incumbent stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether.
Circle's USDC, the second-largest stablecoin with a market cap of about $74 billion, relies heavily on reserve interest income — the source of 99 percent of its 2024 revenue, according to its filing. Circle paid Coinbase $908 million that year to distribute USDC. Coinbase, now an OUSD consortium member, has a revenue-sharing deal with Circle that comes up for renewal in August. Circle's stock fell nearly 15 percent on the Open USD news, touching its lowest level of the session.
Tether's USDT, the largest stablecoin at roughly $185 billion, was not part of the consortium. Neither was PayPal.
The RLUSD burn could reflect a strategic adjustment by Ripple or a major holder ahead of the competitive shift. With a market cap of $1.4 billion, RLUSD is significantly smaller than the incumbents but holds regulatory standing in the U.S. Ripple has also joined the Open USD consortium, giving it access to a highly liquid rail for cross-border settlement and decentralized finance operations — potentially reducing the need for a large proprietary stablecoin supply.
Open USD is scheduled to go live later this year on Plasma and other chains built for stablecoin payments. The consortium structure echoes Facebook's Libra project from 2019, which Visa, Mastercard and Stripe also backed before abandoning it within months under regulatory pressure. Whether Open USD can avoid a similar fate will depend on how regulators classify the token and whether the consortium's governance structure can withstand competing interests among its members.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
