Circle's toughest day ever. Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, along with over 140 companies, launched a new stablecoin called Open USD—zero cost for businesses to mint and redeem, no supply limits, and the interest generated from reserves is automatically returned to partners, with the platform only taking a small operational fee. This move goes straight for the jugular. The business model of USDT and USDC boils down to one sentence: take your dollars, buy U.S. Treasury bonds to earn interest, pocket all the profits, and give you a token worth one dollar. Open USD flips the script by directly returning that interest to the distribution partners. Governance has also changed—there’s no single controlling entity. Decisions are made by a board of partner companies, with Zach Abrams from Bridge (a Stripe subsidiary) as the founding CEO. Launching within the year, it will initially support Solana, Polygon, Aptos, and Stellar. As soon as the news dropped, CRCL fell 18% in one day. USDC’s moat was never about technology; it was about who distributed it. Today, this group has taken the opposite side.