Open USD – Stablecoin’s New Gold Standard for Trust, Compliance, Governance and Economics

July 1, 2026

Executive Summary

  • 140+ institutions — Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Google, Coinbase, and major global banks form the largest stablecoin consortium ever assembled
  • Shares reserve economics — Partners receive yield from underlying reserves, not the issuer; flips the Circle/Tether model
  • Zero-fee minting at scale — No volume limits, no enterprise penalties
  • Pre-transaction compliance — Transfer hooks block sanctioned transactions before settlement, not after
  • Burn and clawback authority — Architectural ability to freeze/burn for OFAC compliance built into Token-2022 implementation
  • Confidential transfers with regulatory visibility — ZK-encrypted balances for corporate privacy; viewing keys for auditors
  • Neutral governance — Independent board of ecosystem partners; no single corporate controller
  • Stripe default — “The default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe”

Yesterday, we witnessed the launch of what may become the most consequential stablecoin ever: Open USD (OUSD). With over 140 financial, technology, and crypto institutions signing on—from Visa and Mastercard to Stripe, BlackRock, and Google. This isn’t merely another stablecoin entering a crowded market. This is the emergence of a new trust network architecture that I’ve been writing about for years.

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PIX Update

My last blog on PIX was 2022, so it is time for an update. When Brazil’s Central Bank (BCB) launched PIX in November 2020, the stated goal was simple: kill cash. Four years later, mission accomplished and then some. PIX has evolved from a peer-to-peer transfer tool into something far more consequential: a domestic debit scheme that challenges the card networks (debit).

The June 2026 launch of Pix Automático marks the inflection point. Brazil now has a government-mandated recurring payment rail that bypasses Visa and Mastercard entirely for subscriptions and utility billing. The BCB’s own PIX Statistics dashboard shows the trajectory:

  • 79.7 billion transactions in 2025—a 26% year-over-year increase
  • BRL 35.3 trillion (~$6.3 trillion USD) in value moved
  • 93% of Brazilian adults now use PIX
  • For the first time, Person-to-Business (P2B) transactions surpassed P2P, now representing over 44% of total volume
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ZelleUSD — A Private Coin

Builds on: Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust | JPMorgan, Citi and TCH: Tokenized Deposits ON Chain | Open Banking, Open Payments and Trust Networks

Early Warning announced this week that Zelle is going international, starting with India — the world’s largest remittance destination. Alongside this, they unveiled ZelleUSD (ZLUSD), which they’re calling a “proprietary U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin.” Cue the analyst notes about banks “finally getting into stablecoin.”

I’m already laughing… this is Banks BEATING Stableocin and Remittance Providers at their own game with a closed network. This Is Not a competitor to USDC, and you can’t buy it on Coinbase, so Don’t Get Confused.

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Agentic Data Battle: Intent

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Key Friction Point in Agent (M2M) Transactions. Example of why real agentic transactions are 2-3 yrs away. We have a new party in a transaction that everyone needs to trust: the agent. Mastercard/Google Verifiable Intent is a LONG WAY from satisfying the need. It’s a self-attestation (see the Technical Addendum at the end of the Blog).

My prior blogs have focused extensively on the trust challenge in agentic commerce: authenticating the consumer and the agent (the actor). As I discussed in EMVCo and DPCs, financial institutions must verify and authenticate the four pillars of a transaction: the User, the Instrument, the Actor (Agent), and the Action (Payment). Today, I want to dive deeper into the fourth pillar—the Action—and the emerging battle over intent data.

A New Party to the Transaction

For decades, payment transactions have involved a familiar cast: the consumer, the merchant, the issuer, and the network. Each party has well-defined roles, risk allocation, and data flows governed by established rule sets. Agentic commerce introduces a new party: the Agent.

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JPMorgan, Citi and TCH: Tokenized Deposits ON Chain

Builds on: 101 Update: CBDCs, Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits | Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust | Stablecoin Scenarios The WSJ reported yesterday that JPMorgan, Citigroup, and TCH (a consortium of the largest US banks) are planning a shared tokenized deposit system. For anyone who has been following this space, this is not a surprise. It is a confirmation. I’ve been writing about this trajectory for years. The question was never whether banks would adopt blockchain infrastructure. The question was always how and the commercial construct that governs operation. Now we know.  Continue reading

Is Know Your Agent (KYA) Really Necessary?

Is “Know Your Agent” (KYA) Really Necessary? The tale of an Orphan Signal

Short Blog | June 2026

A new category of startup has emerged around “Know Your Agent” (KYA) — the idea that merchants and payment platforms need a framework to verify the identity, authority, and auditability of AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. PYMNTS has covered the space extensively, and KnowYourAgent.xyz is already pitching merchants on “identity, policy controls, and evidence for every AI-agent transaction at checkout.” The framing is intuitive: if a bot is buying something, shouldn’t you know who sent it?

I want to push back — not on the problem, but on whether KYA, as a standalone service category, is the right solution.

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DPCs Great Idea with a Long Way To Go

© Starpoint LLP, 2026. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider an Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients). 

Executive Summary

I’m fortunate to chat with a diversity of large payment network stakeholders. As most of you know, I view the challenge in payments more from a political/incentive viewpoint than a technical one. The alphabet soup of new standards is hard to keep up with, but be assured that each one has a proponent (who benefits) and a group of resistors. Innovation in a network is hard, as existing stakeholders have built assets and competitive positions based upon how things work today. Today’s blog covers DPCs. DPCs may not be the biggest threat, but they are the newest. I’m not going to attempt a deep tech dive into DPCs; my effort is focused more on the challenges faced by any new payment innovation to gain traction and scale. Network effects are hard to beat!

Why read this blog? My readers know I view identity and authentication as part of the core “bundle” of payments, and Visa/MA are the de facto identity infrastructure of the internet because they unlock the power of banks (ie KYC) within a commercial framework with active governance. Today we are breaking down the latest “threat”: Digital Payment Credentials (DPCs) within Agentic(ie Gemini, GPay). The quick summary is that DPCs are an amazing technical innovation without a commercial framework or active governance, and thus will be challenged to operate separately from established networks (just like Stablecoins). This 23 page monster blog is a breakdown of the politics and the tech.

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AP2 Donation to FIDO 

Yesterday Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance , let me share my thoughts on what this means.  

  1. Effort to drive cross-industry standardization and extend Google’s established success within the FIDO ecosystem (log in with Google) while addressing the structural limitations of FIDO.
  2. A “tipping point” transition from “Identity as a Service” to “Identity as an Infrastructure,” where the mobile handset functions as the primary root of trust for autonomous commerce. Google is telling FIDO that they must incorporate elements of W3C VCs to have a future.
  3. Google’s first big public move toward device bound credentials (Titan M2, Anroid Credential Manager, Android Ready Alliance, …etc).

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Owning Your Bot’s Actions: Target Part 2

In my previous post, covering Target’s “Your Bot is Your Responsibility”  was the only move they could make. When you let an AI bot loose with your credit card, you are effectively handing your car keys to a teenager; you can’t act surprised when there’s a dent in the bumper. But Target’s stance isn’t just a legal shield; it is a flare gun fired over a massive Governance Gap. Today’s agentic commerce is high on technology and standards, but dangerously low on the commercial terms that actually make markets function. To be clear, it’s not for lack of effort from V/MA, nor is it technology; it is resistance to change.

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MPP Phase 2 Live – Ask Tom Goes Agentic

Long blog – First 2 Pages are economic implications, last 6 pages are tech deep dive

MPP is a big deal because value exchange enables specialization and market forces to operate (as discussed in last week’s MPP – Addressing the Internet’s “Original Sin”.MPP and X402 are BIG.. really big. A whole new market. This isn’t about cash replacement or taking share from xx this is about enabling a new Economy. Today’s blog is 4 paragraphs of the economic implications (for investors and CEOs), followed by 4 pages on tech detail covering what I built. Please note “Ask-Tom” is just a model of an x402 service…. of course it won’t generate much demand (service ID is at bottom).

First, let me try to explain why this is such a big deal from an economic perspective. The foundational driver for MPP’s success is the radical reduction of transaction costs through standardized commercial terms. As outlined in my 2016 blog Small Wins, the forces that once drove asset-heavy, integrated organizations are atrophying in favor of “refragmentation” and specialized networks. Historically, the economic cost of inking a bilateral contract for every micro-interaction was prohibitive (ex “Account Creation” bottleneck that stifled agentic autonomy). Following the principles of Ronald Coase’s Transaction Cost Economics, MPP and x402 provide the multilateral governance and common commercial rules necessary to bypass these friction points. By establishing trust and speed through a common interface, these protocols allow for the “Small Win” of a single transaction to scale into a global network effect, where the cost of connection approaches zero.

This standardization enables the “Value Assembly” of “super-specialists” who can target previously unreachable “shale deposits” of niche market demand (see Network Effects and Value Assembly). A successful network enables specialists like “Ask-Tom” to provide high-value, grounded intelligence without the overhead of building independent settlement or reconciliation infrastructure. This is far beyond mere “agentic commerce”; it is an evolution in how software and hardware interact with EVERYTHING ECONOMICALLY. For example, MPP’s session-based economics provides a virtual “bar tab” for agents to execute tasks within human-granted budgets, paying only for precise resource consumption. This creates a sustainable commercial model where the incentives for specialization and market forces to operate on software service at a hyper granular level. Market forces in turn encourage specialists to solve increasingly granular problems across diverse domains, and unlocks the “shale deposits” of data that doesn’t play. I’ll discuss what this could look like next week as a follow up to Value Assembly.

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