Visa and Stripe back OpenUSD to target Tether yield
- Visa, Stripe, and Coinbase backed OpenUSD with a $1 billion liquidity pool.
- OpenUSD distributes reserve yield to partners based on transaction volume instead of hoarding it.
- Spiral merged Lightning payments into the X402 standard for autonomous AI agents.
Tether's yield monopoly is facing direct institutional competition.
Former Stripe executive Zach Abrams is leading the launch of OpenUSD, backed by a $1 billion liquidity commitment from payment giants Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify, and Coinbase. Tether generates billions by hoarding high-yield Treasury interest on collateral while leaving payment rails uncompensated. OpenUSD inverts this arrangement by distributing equity and reserve yield back to members based on their transaction volume.
On Presidio Bitcoin Jam, host Steve Lee noted that the alliance forces traditional networks into a strategic pivot. Visa and Mastercard are securing governance positions within open stablecoin protocols to guard their long-term fee extraction rights. Even Coinbase, bound to Circle by a USDC revenue agreement through 2029, joined OpenUSD to capture institutional enterprise flows that standard USDC fails to reach.
The settlement war extends beyond human commerce into machine-to-machine transactions. Spiral developer Ben Carmen recently merged a pull request adding native Bitcoin Lightning support to Coinbase’s HTTP-based X402 payment standard. Block and Steve Lee formally joined the standard, creating an open protocol for autonomous systems to settle micro-transactions without traditional banking friction.
Protocol integration does not instantly solve real-world adoption. Lee cautioned on Presidio Bitcoin Jam that adding Lightning code to X402 does not automatically force merchants to run Bitcoin wallets or generate Bolt 11 invoices. Realizing volume requires merchant networks to update their settlement stacks, leaving stablecoins as the immediate incumbent choice for conventional digital storefronts.
Autonomous AI agents could alter that trajectory. Co-host Max pointed out on the show that machine actors operate without human user experience constraints like key management or seed phrase anxiety. Unencumbered by design trade-offs, AI agents naturally favor permissionless networks like Lightning, Nostr, and private execution environments like Lexi when making autonomous micro-payments.
A major risk remains centralized software gatekeepers. Co-host DK warned on Presidio Bitcoin Jam that walled-garden platforms like Meta's Muse or Instinct could route AI agent transactions onto proprietary rails. Unless open consumer agent platforms win market share, corporate platform operators will retain control over which currencies software bots are allowed to spend.
The race for machine liquidity has begun.