Ripple Joins Industry-Wide 'Open USD' Consortium Backed by BlackRock, Mastercard, and Google

Ripple has become part of a landmark coalition of more than 140 companies spanning the financial, technology, and cryptocurrency sectors. The consortium, which includes industry titans such as BlackRock, Mastercard, Google, Visa, and Stripe, is rallying around a brand-new stablecoin initiative known as "Open USD."

The initiative is designed to tackle some of the most persistent obstacles that have slowed the stablecoin market's expansion, including scalability challenges, governance concerns, and structural inefficiencies. Rather than being controlled by a single corporate entity, Open USD will be issued and managed by an independent organization called Open Standard, a structure intended to ensure neutrality and shared accountability across all participants.

One of the core problems the new stablecoin seeks to fix is the cost burden placed on large businesses operating within the current stablecoin ecosystem. Today's models frequently impose steep minting and redemption fees on enterprises, while third-party issuers retain the interest and yield generated by the cash reserves backing those tokens. Open USD flips this dynamic entirely: member businesses will be able to mint and redeem the stablecoin at zero cost, and any earnings derived from the underlying reserves will be distributed among all consortium partners. Additionally, the governance model is specifically designed to prevent any single participant from unilaterally altering the protocol's rules.

The breadth of the coalition is striking. On the traditional finance side, Ripple now stands alongside payment processors Mastercard, Visa, and American Express, as well as institutional asset managers and banks including BlackRock and BNY. The technology sector is well represented too, with Google, Shopify, and DoorDash among the notable backers. Crypto-native companies are also at the table, with Coinbase, Fireblocks, and Solana all listed as participants.

For Ripple specifically, membership in the Open USD consortium could provide a highly liquid settlement infrastructure for both cross-border payments and decentralized finance operations — two areas central to the company's long-term strategy.

However, questions remain about how Open USD will interact with Ripple's own stablecoin product, RLUSD. The regulated stablecoin, which currently carries a market capitalization of approximately $1.4 billion, occupies a similar space in the payments ecosystem. Whether the two products will complement or compete with each other is yet to be determined.

Mastercard, for its part, has emphasized that the success of a project of this scale will depend on "trusted networks, broad participation, and collaboration across the industry" — a sentiment that appears to be the guiding philosophy behind the entire Open USD endeavor.

The announcement signals a growing convergence between traditional financial institutions, Big Tech platforms, and the crypto industry, all moving toward shared infrastructure for the next generation of digital payments.