Zach Abrams targets Tether yield with OpenUSD backer alliance
- Visa, Stripe, and Coinbase backed OpenUSD with $1 billion to challenge Tether's stablecoin dominance.
- OpenUSD shares reserve interest with payment networks based on the transaction volume they generate.
- Spiral developer Ben Carmen added native Bitcoin settlement to the open X402 payment standard.
Tether's $100 billion yield monopoly finally faces organized corporate rebellion. In late September 2026, payment processing heavyweights Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and Shopify committed $1 billion in liquidity to launch OpenUSD under former Stripe executive Zach Abrams.
The new protocol attacks Tether at its balance sheet. While Tether retains every dollar of interest earned on its Treasury holdings, OpenUSD distributes reserve yields and equity back to the platforms driving transaction volume. On Presidio Bitcoin Jam, Steve Lee explained that traditional payment networks view this governance stake as an essential hedge, ensuring they extract fees even if transaction settlement migrates away from legacy card rails.
Coinbase joined the coalition despite holding an existing USDC revenue-sharing agreement with Circle through 2029. Joining OpenUSD allows Coinbase to capture enterprise transaction flows that USDC cannot reach on its own. The corporate alliance reflects a broader realization among payment processors: the future settlement layer will belong to whichever protocol incentivizes distribution partners rather than hoarding Treasury yields.
That infrastructure shift arrives just as autonomous software agents begin flooding digital payment networks. Speaking on TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast, investor Jordi Visser told host Marty Bent that machine-to-machine token traffic now outpaces human interaction with artificial intelligence. Software bots do not care about traditional clearing delays or weekend banking hours, forcing automated workflows onto instant crypto rails.
The demand for machine-native rails is prompting parallel upgrades across open protocols. On Presidio Bitcoin Jam, discussion centered on Spiral developer Ben Carmen merging native Bitcoin support into Coinbase’s X402 payment standard. Block subsequently joined the standard alongside Steve Lee, giving autonomous AI agents direct access to Lightning settlement alongside dollar-pegged stablecoins.
Protocol code alone does not ensure widespread commercial use. Lee noted on Presidio Bitcoin Jam that merchants must still actively run Bitcoin wallets and generate Bolt 11 invoices to receive agent payments. Meanwhile, proprietary agent platforms like Muse or Instinct threaten to steer machine traffic back toward closed payment rails unless open-source consumer bots achieve mainstream scale.
Corporate payment giants and autonomous agents are remaking global transaction settlement at the same time. Whether volume flows through yield-sharing stablecoins or permissionless Lightning channels, the era of single-issuer monopolies is over.
Source Intelligence
- Deep dive into what was said in the episodes
Block Brings Bitcoin to x402, Open USD Enters the Race, Trump Renames AI • Sep 25
- The X402 payment protocol specification officially merged support for Bitcoin and Lightning, driven by a pull request from Spiral developer Ben Carmen. Block subsequently announced it was joining the standard alongside Coinbase.
Also discussed on this episode: (10)
Media (2)
- Presidio Bitcoin Jam saw its baseline traffic increase to 600 views per episode, up from 100 to 200 views during its first year. A past episode covering a Coldcard incident reached 3,400 views.
- Presidio Bitcoin Jam changed its tagline to "open money, open intelligence" to reflect its coverage of AI and Bitcoin. This aligns with Spiral's tagline and a broader industry trend of merging open source AI with cryptocurrency.
Stablecoins (2)
- Zach Abrams is leaving Stripe to lead a new independent stablecoin issuer for OpenUSD. Backed by Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Shopify, the consortium is deploying one billion dollars for liquidity.
- Coinbase renewed its USDC revenue-sharing agreement with Circle in August, securing its economic terms through 2029. This agreement creates a financial headwind for Coinbase when capital migrates to competitive stablecoins like OpenUSD.
Lightning (1)
- Spiral developers are integrating Bitcoin Lightning payments into Mesh LLM, an open source peer-to-peer AI inference project. This enables node hosts to monetize their spare compute on a decentralized network.
Privacy (1)
- Steve Lee plans to pitch Signal's Meredith Whitaker on integrating Mesh LLM to provide private, decentralized AI capabilities. This setup would leverage Signal's existing enclaves and allow developers to monetize secure Nvidia hardware.
Models (1)
- Max notes that futurist Ray Kurzweil remains remarkably accurate with his prediction that AI will achieve human-level intelligence by 2029. Kurzweil models the technological singularity to occur in 2045.
Payments (1)
- Steve Lee argues that proving humanness is a red herring for bot prevention, citing Nikita Beer's insights on bot issues at X. Instead, metered cryptocurrency payments like X402 provide the optimal economic rate-limiting solution.
Nostr (1)
- Max successfully deployed a backup of meme-pay.dev to decentralized Blossom servers using the Insight.lol gateway and Nostr keys. This allows the web application to run permissionlessly outside traditional DNS architecture.
Startups (1)
- AI search startup Particle integrated the X402 standard into its Radar podcast indexing database. The service charges users per database query but lacks native Bitcoin and Lightning support.