A popoluar crypto analyst is arguing that Stellar’s biggest opportunity may not be another exchange listing or retail hype cycle, but a dry-sounding piece of infrastructure: a new consortium stablecoin called OpenUSD (OUSD) that rewires who earns interest on reserves.
OpenUSD is being launched by an organization called Open Standard and has drawn support from more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Stripe, Google, Coinbase, and Shopify. Cheeky Crypto frames it not as “just another stablecoin,” but as a direct challenge to the business model that underpins giants like USDC.
OpenUSD Just Flipped The Stablecoin Revenue Model
Conventional issuers take in dollars, park most of the backing in short-term government debt and similar assets, and keep the interest. Users get a token redeemable for $1 but none of the yield. With tens of billions in circulation and high rates, that reserve income becomes the core of the business.
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OpenUSD, as described in the video, proposes to share much of that reserve income with the companies that distribute and integrate the stablecoin—payment processors, exchanges, fintech apps—while Open Standard retains only a management fee.
Cheeky Crypto notes that this turns distributors from passive channels into economic participants, giving them “a reason to favour OUSD” rather than just pushing someone else’s profitable product.
The YouTube episode points out that Circle’s share price dropped sharply after the announcement, which the analyst interprets as investors recognizing the threat to USDC’s model, not just from a rival token but from a rival incentive structure.
Stellar’s Role: The Clear Infrastructure Play Deciphered
Stellar appears on the OpenUSD launch partner list, but the analyst stresses that this is not a pivot: the network has spent years focused on payments, remittances, and tokenized currencies.
USDC already runs on Stellar, PayPal’s PYUSD has been tied to Stellar-based use cases, and MoneyGram has used the network to bridge physical cash and digital assets.
OpenUSD is expected to be multi-chain, which means Stellar must compete with networks like Base, Solana, and the XRP Ledger to become a primary settlement rail.
The opportunity lies in corridors where corporates need 24/7 settlement, local currency access, liquidity, and compliance tooling—areas where Stellar has invested in “financial access points” to banks and cash services.
For XLM holders, the analyst warns against assuming $1 billion of OUSD flow equals $1 billion of XLM buying. Native tokens mainly serve for fees, reserves, and liquidity routing. The deeper upside is network relevance: if OpenUSD drives real payment volume, more developers, institutions, and liquidity providers may treat Stellar as standard infrastructure.
Governance remains a major risk. With 140+ participants, interests will diverge: banks, exchanges, payment firms, asset managers, merchants, fintechs, and blockchain networks may all want different things from yields, supported chains, and risk management.
Cheeky Crypto identifies “fragmentation” inside the consortium as the main villain: famous names and capital are not enough if they cannot coordinate during normal operations, let alone a crisis.
Execution will be the real test once OpenUSD goes live later this year. Metrics the analyst flags as critical for judging Stellar’s position include how much OUSD is issued on Stellar, whether major partners integrate it into live products, the depth of liquidity, and whether on-chain flows reflect real business activity rather than short-term trading.
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Cheeky Crypto stresses that stablecoin usage mainly creates modest fee and liquidity demand for the native asset, not one-to-one buying pressure.
Because OpenUSD’s shared-yield model directly challenges the practice of a single issuer capturing most reserve income, which is central to USDC’s economics.
Not exclusive. OpenUSD is open, multi-network infrastructure. Stellar is a launch partner but must compete with other chains for meaningful volume.
Actual OUSD issuance on Stellar, integration in real products, payment and redemption volumes, and whether liquidity and trust in the $1 peg deepen over time.