APIA, Samoa, Aug. 13, 2026 — HTX Ventures, the global investment arm of HTX, has published a new report titled Open Infrastructure, Closed Financial Rails: Open USD, Revenue Redistribution, and Participant Governance. The report examines how stablecoin revenue distribution, channel relationships, and governance structures are shifting in the wake of Open USD (OUSD), which was unveiled on June 30, 2026.

The report's central thesis is that while blockchain technology has created open, global, and programmable technical infrastructure, the industry's next competitive phase will be defined by how participants contest control rights and the allocation of economic benefits. The technical layer has opened; the economic layer is only beginning to.

Closed Economic Structures atop Open Technology

Stablecoins have evolved from settlement instruments within cryptocurrency trading into tools for cross-border payments, corporate treasury management, and institutional back-office clearing. Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot reached an annualized run rate of approximately $7 billion by April 2026 across nine blockchains. Meanwhile, Swift, the Canton Network, Fnality, and Project Agorá are exploring how tokenized deposits and central bank money can settle within shared environments.

Despite this expansion, economic rights remain distributed along traditional lines. Issuers mint stablecoins against user dollars and allocate reserves into cash and short-term Treasuries, with reserve yields accruing solely to the issuers. Tether and Circle, whose USDT and USDC together account for the overwhelming majority of stablecoin market capitalization, have each built their businesses around this model; Tether alone has reported billions of dollars in net profit from its reserve holdings, underscoring the economic stakes of who controls that yield stream. The broader system, however, depends on exchanges and wallets for user access, payment companies to connect merchants, banks for fiat on/off-ramps, custodians for reserves, and market makers for secondary market depth. These institutions bear integration, compliance, and liquidity costs, yet currently capture revenue primarily through bilateral commercial agreements in which bargaining power is heavily tied to their own user scale.

Three Institutional Shifts in OUSD's Design

Under Open Standard's framework, enterprises can mint and redeem OUSD free of charge and without volume limits. Open Standard charges a small management fee, with remaining reserve yields earmarked for partners who adopt and promote OUSD, as well as select partners planning to join its board of directors. The published partner roster exceeds 140 entities, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, and BNY.

HTX Ventures identifies three structural shifts in the design:

1. From fee-based access to subsidized distribution. Reserve yields are used to offset genuinely expensive investments in customer acquisition, liquidity, regional compliance, and fiat rails.
2. From bilateral negotiations to network-wide revenue sharing. Mid-sized payment companies, regional banks, and vertical wallets are brought into a unified framework where partners share revenue based on contribution.
3. From issuer governance to participant governance. Institutions that bear business and regulatory responsibility are given a voice in rule-making.

The timing intersects with a regulatory landscape that has grown more concrete. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, which began full enforcement for stablecoin issuers in mid-2024, introduced reserve composition, disclosure, and operational requirements across the European market. In the United States, multiple legislative proposals have sought to establish federal oversight of stablecoin issuance and reserves. These frameworks make governance design and the allocation of economic rights not merely commercial choices but regulatory considerations, as supervisors scrutinize who controls stablecoin networks and under what accountability structures.

OUSD is slated for launch later in 2026. Notably, it shares the OUSD code with Origin Protocol's Origin Dollar, launched in 2020, though the two are distinct products.

Execution Details Will Determine Whether the Model Holds

According to HTX Ventures, the model's viability depends on several specific mechanisms. Revenue-sharing rules directly determine who captures value: allocation by balance favors institutions with greater capital resources, while allocation by transaction volume can be distorted by internal transfers that generate activity without real payments. A workable mechanism, the report suggests, would weigh balance retention, actual payments, new customers, and regional compliance investments together. The governance arrangement likewise rests on what the board can actually decide, not on how many institutions appear on the roster.

More fundamentally, a considerable distance separates joining a consortium from migrating core business operations. The history of financial consortia offers relevant precedent: collaborative ventures in payments and settlement have repeatedly struggled to align competing institutions around shared infrastructure, governance, and economics. What ultimately determines network value is stable balances, real payment volume, market-making depth, and smooth redemptions.

Value Chain Revenue Faces Redistribution

If revenue-sharing models generate sustained payment volumes, the room for issuers to retain the full reserve yield spread will narrow. Exchanges, wallets, and payment companies that control access to users, liquidity, and payment use cases may shift from functioning as distribution tools to becoming participants in revenue-sharing and governance arrangements.

For banks, the impact cuts both ways. Deposits and correspondent banking revenue may erode, but stablecoins still require reserve custody, fiat on/off-ramps, and FX liquidity. Card networks face limited direct impact, given their role in authorization, fraud management, and merchant acceptance. Across clearing, custody, and data services, fees based on proprietary records may decline while services tied to security and liability expand.

The Next Dimension of Competition

Open USD raises a question that extends beyond stablecoins: when banks, payment processors, exchanges, asset managers, and custodians provide the underlying assets, customer relationships, liquidity, and compliance capabilities, how will the value chain distribute profits and control?

Such shifts are most likely in middle- and back-office infrastructure, where multiple institutions are required and no single platform can independently provide customer reach, regional licensing, fiat rails, and counterparty networks. Institutions need shared infrastructure but remain reluctant to cede core operations, client data, and risk authority to a direct competitor. Consortium governance and revenue sharing, the report argues, are therefore not ideological commitments to decentralization but pragmatic commercial prerequisites for cross-institutional networks.

HTX Ventures notes that along this trajectory, stablecoin competition will move beyond issuance scale and on-chain liquidity toward questions of who contributes network value, who shares infrastructure revenue, who retains customers and data, and who sets operating rules. The next generation of financial infrastructure need not be fully decentralized; more likely, it evolves from single-company control toward networks where regulated participants connect, share returns, and govern major decisions through tiered arrangements.

As a research and investment firm with a long-standing focus on payment infrastructure and institutional settlement networks, HTX Ventures indicated it will continue tracking how this redistribution of revenue, customers, and rule-setting shapes the industry's direction.

About HTX Ventures

HTX Ventures is the global investment arm of HTX, integrating investment, incubation, and research to identify and discover innovative projects in the market.