Zach Abrams launches OpenUSD to strip Tether reserve profits
- Zach Abrams leads OpenUSD with $1 billion from Visa, Stripe, and Shopify to challenge Tether.
- OpenUSD distributes reserve interest directly to payment processors and merchants based on transaction volume.
- Autonomous AI agents drive demand for programmable dollar rails and instant machine settlement networks.
Tether built a multi-billion-dollar moat by keeping all its reserve interest. A corporate alliance wants that yield back.
Former Stripe executive Zach Abrams is leading the launch of OpenUSD, backed by a $1 billion liquidity commitment from Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify, and Coinbase. The consortium targets Tether’s fundamental cash engine. Where Tether absorbs billions in Treasury yields generated by underlying reserves, OpenUSD distributes equity and reserve interest directly to payment networks and merchants proportional to the volume they process.
The arrangement creates complex economic incentives across crypto and legacy finance. Coinbase secured a USDC revenue-sharing deal with Circle through 2029, yet joined the OpenUSD launch to capture enterprise payment flows that USDC struggles to reach. On Presidio Bitcoin Jam, Steve Lee emphasized that traditional networks like Visa and Mastercard view OpenUSD as a defensive hedge, ensuring they retain fee extraction rights even as settlement shifts off legacy card rails.
The push for programmable dollars is being accelerated by autonomous machine traffic. On TFTC, macro investor Jordi Visser told Marty Bent that agent-to-agent token transfers are expanding rapidly as software agents handle scheduling, purchases, and refunds without human oversight. Legacy card networks and clearinghouses introduce artificial friction for non-human actors that require non-stop settlement.
That machine demand is forcing technical protocol convergence. Spiral developer Ben Carmen recently merged a pull request adding native Bitcoin and Lightning support to Coinbase’s X402 payment standard, bringing Block and Steve Lee into the framework. Yet software integration alone does not guarantee real-world traction. On Presidio Bitcoin Jam, co-host DK warned that proprietary agent platforms could route machine traffic into closed ecosystems unless open protocols win early adoption.
Beyond daily payment rails, the migration toward tokenized assets alters underlying monetary velocity. Visser noted on TFTC that tokenizing real-world credit and property could unlock liquidity across $900 trillion in global wealth. Integrating previously illiquid assets directly into M2 velocity threatens traditional central bank liquidity cycles, leaving hard assets like Bitcoin as the structural backstop against ongoing fiat currency debasement.
The battle for global dollar settlement is no longer just about human consumers. It is about who controls the tollbooths for machine money.
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.
- 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.
Also discussed on this episode: (9)
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 (1)
- 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.
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.
Marty Bent
#795: Tokenization Unlocks $900 Trillion in Wealth with Jordi Visser • Sep 24
- Jordi Visser claims tokenization will unlock $900 trillion in illiquid assets, allowing them to be transacted directly. This integration into M2 ends the traditional central bank liquidity cycle by preventing forced asset liquidations during financial panics.
Also discussed on this episode: (8)
Agents (2)
- Jordi Visser details a flight cancellation where a traveler using the AI agent Muse secured a refund and rebooked within minutes. This illustrates how consumer AI agents will efficiently recapture lost capital, driving massive deflationary pressure across the service economy.
- Jordi Visser references page 71 of Leopold Aschenbrenner's essay, Situational Awareness, arguing AI acceleration will render human-centric systems like SWIFT obsolete. Transactions will speed up past human comprehension, forcing agents to demand faster, programmatic digital rails.
Enterprise (1)
- Marty Bent notes that Latham and Watkins purchased Nvidia GPUs to self-host their own institutional knowledge base and protect intellectual property. Jordi Visser compares this to Eli Lilly deploying its private LillyPod data center in January to process proprietary data.
Stablecoins (1)
- Jordi Visser highlights Stripe's acquisition of Bridge as a massive bet on stablecoins and agentic commerce. Stripe paid a massive premium for a young startup, preparing its transaction stack for automated, agent-to-agent payments.
Privacy (1)
- Jordi Visser points to a16z partner Ali Yahya to argue that privacy networks like ZCash are heavily undervalued. As agents interact autonomously, they will require secure cryptography, making transaction privacy a primary metric of network value.
Mining (1)
- Marty Bent recounts his experience running flare gas Bitcoin mining operations in North Dakota. Jordi Visser explains that miners act as synthetic battery systems, stabilizing modern grids through demand response and monetization of excess energy.
Coding (1)
- Marty Bent details how Rob Hamilton of Anchor Watch audited GitHub repositories after an AI-exploited Coldcard entropy bug. The team created a code-inspecting harness, identifying and fixing hundreds of vulnerabilities across open-source Bitcoin projects.
Models (1)
- Jordi Visser cites Palantir CEO Alex Karp's prediction that OpenAI will be nationalized within a year. Powerful AI models will increasingly be treated as state-controlled military weapons, posing terminal value risks to public tech corporations.