"What this week's Open USD launch - backed by 140-plus payments giants including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase - really means is that stablecoin infrastructure just stopped being a land grab and started being a shared utility."
"For years, every stablecoin issuer has tried to build a moat: proprietary rails, exclusive deals, fees stitched into every transfer. Open USD flips that logic. No minting fees, no artificial volume caps, reserve earnings split across partners rather than pocketed by one issuer. That last point matters more than it sounds. Reserve yield is the actual business model behind most stablecoins - it's how issuers make money while promising users a 'free' dollar. Splitting that yield across 140 partners only works if volume is enormous, which tells you these companies think this is going to get very big, very fast."
"The timing isn't an accident either. The Genius Act gave stablecoins a regulatory floor to build on, and now the biggest names in payments are racing to make sure that floor has infrastructure they actually control a piece of, rather than infrastructure owned by a single crypto-native player. It's the same instinct that built SWIFT: nobody wanted correspondent banking run by one bank, so they built a cooperative instead."
"The 140 logos aren't the interesting part. What matters is whether 'collaborative governance' survives the first real disagreement - over fee splits, reserve yield, or who gets settlement priority during a spike. Cooperative infrastructure tends to work brilliantly at launch and get political the moment there's real money on the table."
"No merchant wants to bet on a single stablecoin surviving, and no processor wants to hard-code one into their rails. That's the same problem orchestration already solves on the card side - routing in real time across whichever rail actually clears. Stablecoins are just the next rail. For processors, the opportunity isn't picking Open USD's winner - it's building the orchestration layer that doesn't have to."
About the author
Radi El Haj is Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of RS2, where he leads the company’s global strategy to deliver next-generation payment processing infrastructure for banks and financial institutions worldwide. With more than 25 years in the payments industry, Radi has built deep expertise across issuing, acquiring, clearing and settlement, e-commerce, and financial accounting architecture.
Since joining RS2 in 1997, Radi has played a pivotal role in the company’s international expansion and platform evolution. From leading complex issuing and acquiring transformations across Europe and the Middle East to opening the North American, Latin American and Asian Pacific markets, he has consistently driven large-scale deployments that modernise core payment environments for banks operating across multiple regions.
Appointed CEO in 2013, Radi combines commercial vision with hands-on product and infrastructure expertise. His close collaboration with technical and product development teams has helped shape RS2’s unified, globally compliant platform - enabling financial institutions to scale across markets, strengthen operational control and modernise both issuing and acquiring from a single processing foundation.
Under his leadership, RS2 has evolved from a technology provider into a strategic infrastructure partner for banks navigating large-scale payment transformation.
About RS2
RS2 is a Tier-1 global provider of payment processing infrastructure and technology solutions, enabling banks and payment providers to modernise issuing and acquiring operations on a single, unified platform. Its cloud-native Global Payment Platform delivers end-to-end processing, orchestration, clearing and settlement across all channels and payment types.
Designed to support financial institutions at every stage of their growth, RS2’s architecture provides a single integration point for real-time transaction processing, data-driven decision-making and seamless expansion into new markets. Through its advanced orchestration layer, clients gain full visibility and control over payment flows, performance optimisation, reconciliation and value-added services.
By combining operational resilience with API-first flexibility, RS2 empowers banks, fintechs and payment providers to accelerate innovation, improve authorisation performance and drive sustainable revenue growth in an increasingly digital payments landscape.
