Visa and Stripe back OpenUSD to drain Tether yields

Zach Abrams is executing a $1 billion raid on Tether's balance sheet.

Backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify, and Coinbase, the former Stripe executive's new venture, OpenUSD, promises to redistribute reserve yields directly to payment partners based on transaction volume. Tether built a multi-billion-dollar empire by keeping every dollar of interest generated by its US Treasury reserves. OpenUSD reverses that model, offering giant processors an equity and revenue-sharing incentive to route global commerce through its open stablecoin architecture instead of Tether's vault.

The timing aligns with a fundamental shift in how money moves across the internet. On September 24, 2026, investor Jordi Visser observed on TFTC that autonomous AI agent-to-agent token traffic already outpaces human interactions with artificial intelligence models. As consumer software and enterprise workflows automate purchasing, scheduling, and refunds, traditional payment networks with banking delays become obsolete. Visser argued that programmable digital assets and layer-two networks are becoming the default settlement rails for autonomous software workers operating around the clock.

That friction was on display the following day when Spiral developer Ben Carmen merged a pull request adding native Bitcoin and Lightning support to the x402 payment standard. On Presidio Bitcoin Jam, host Steve Lee noted that Block joined the HTTP payment protocol originally championed by Coinbase. Co-host Max argued that autonomous agents are ideal users for permissionless infrastructure like Lightning because software bots face none of the user-experience friction, such as key management, that hampers human adoption.

Yet protocol integration does not guarantee real-world usage. Lee pointed out that merchants must still actively choose to accept Bitcoin wallets and generate Lightning invoices, leaving stablecoins as the immediate incumbent. Co-host DK warned that walled-garden consumer agent platforms could lock in proprietary payment rails, directing autonomous bot traffic toward favored networks unless open-source platforms establish dominant market share first.

Traditional financial giants recognize the threat to their tollbooths. On Presidio Bitcoin Jam, Lee highlighted how Visa and Mastercard are using OpenUSD as a defensive hedge to retain fee-extraction rights as settlement moves off traditional card rails. Even Coinbase is playing both sides: despite maintaining a USDC revenue-sharing agreement with Circle through 2029, joining the OpenUSD consortium allows the exchange to capture high-volume enterprise flows that USDC cannot reach.

Beyond payment routing, Visser argued on TFTC that tokenizing real-world property and private credit could unlock liquidity across $900 trillion in illiquid global wealth. At the same time, enterprise self-hosting of private GPU infrastructure - deployed by institutions like Blackstone and Latham & Watkins - is driving immediate deflation across service industries by replacing human labor with automated, continuously running computational workflows.

The war for machine-native money has officially begun.