Open USD Launches with 140 Partners, Backbase Acquires Kasisto and DBS Joins the New Stablecoin Standard

This week delivered one of the most consequential stablecoin launches to date, an acquisition reshaping how banks deploy AI, and a reminder that Singapore is already sitting at the table when the biggest names in global payments rewrite the rules. A 140-company consortium including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and Coinbase has launched a rival to Circle’s USDC. Backbase has folded a pioneer in banking AI into its operating system. And DBS Bank, alongside regional super app Grab, is a founding partner in the new stablecoin standard. Here is what is happening, and why it matters for merchants, partners and financial institutions.

Open Standard Launches OUSD as a 140-Partner Rival to Circle

On 30 June, a new company called Open Standard unveiled Open USD (OUSD), a US dollar stablecoin structured to be owned and governed by the businesses that use it rather than run for the profit of a single issuer. The founding partner list is unusually broad for a stablecoin launch: payment networks including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Discover and Fiserv; banks and asset managers including BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, U.S. Bank and BBVA; technology platforms including Google, Shopify, Samsung Electronics and DoorDash; and crypto-native firms including Coinbase, Ripple, Solana, Fireblocks and OKX. More than 140 companies signed on as founding partners. Zach Abrams, co-founder of the stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, which Stripe acquired for 1.1 billion dollars in 2025, leads Open Standard as founding chief executive.

The design is the real departure. OUSD charges no fees to mint or redeem at any scale, sets no volume caps, and returns nearly all of the interest earned on its reserves back to the partners who distribute it, after a small management fee retained by Open Standard. That is a direct challenge to the economics that have made Circle and Tether the dominant stablecoin issuers, where the issuer typically keeps the reserve income. The token will launch natively on Solana, with Base, Stellar, Polygon and Tempo following later in 2026. The market reaction was immediate and sharp. Circle’s stock, ticker CRCL, fell as much as 17.5 percent on the day of the announcement, its worst single session since the company’s IPO, as investors priced in the threat to USDC’s reserve-income business model. The sting is sharper because Coinbase, Circle’s own long-standing USDC distribution partner under an arrangement reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is itself a founding OUSD partner. Stripe’s President of Technology and Business Will Gaybrick said OUSD will become the default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino responded on social media: “Welcome OUSD. Player 2 has entered the game.”

Why it matters: This is the most direct structural challenge either of the two dominant stablecoin issuers has faced. If even a fraction of the 140-plus partners route meaningful volume through OUSD instead of USDC or USDT, the economics of stablecoin issuance shift permanently toward shared, rather than concentrated, reserve income. Skeptics note that consortiums with over a hundred competing members can be difficult to govern and that OUSD has not yet demonstrated real transaction volume. But the partner list alone signals that most of the payments industry now believes the reserve-yield model that built Circle and Tether will not survive unchallenged.

The Debia angle: Our consistent view at Debia is that the future of settlement is interoperability between traditional rails and compliant digital assets, and that value increasingly accrues to whoever orchestrates the payment, not just to whoever issues the underlying asset. OUSD is exactly that thesis playing out at global scale: the businesses that move the volume are now also the businesses that earn the yield. For merchants and payment infrastructure providers, the practical implication is that stablecoin choice is becoming a live commercial decision, not a fixed default, and the winners will be the platforms that can route intelligently across multiple stablecoins as the landscape fragments further.

Backbase Acquires Kasisto to Bring Agentic AI into Banking

On 23 June, banking software provider Backbase announced the acquisition of Kasisto, a pioneer in agentic AI for banks and credit unions whose technology, including its KAIgentic platform and proprietary KaiGPT large language model, has been deployed by lenders including JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, TD and Westpac. The deal folds Kasisto’s New York-based team, its agentic platform and its financial-services intelligence into Backbase’s AI-native Banking OS, a platform that sits above a bank’s core systems to coordinate work across customers, employees and AI agents. Backbase did not disclose financial terms. The combined agentic banking suite became available immediately to all current and future Backbase customers.

The strategic logic centres on a gap Backbase says most banks have not closed. Many banks have deployed AI agents in isolated pockets, capable of answering customer questions but not resolving the underlying request end to end. Kasisto’s reasoning-native agents are built to understand context, apply judgement and act within banking-specific governance and compliance controls, handling tasks from collecting evidence and checking eligibility to applying policy and triggering workflows, all the way through to resolution. Backbase, founded in Amsterdam in 2003, reported more than 350 million dollars in revenue in 2025 and says more than 120 banks run on its platform globally. The acquisition also deepens Backbase’s US footprint, uniting Kasisto’s established North American customer base with Backbase’s own.

Why it matters: This acquisition is a clear signal that the next phase of banking AI is about governed resolution, not just conversation. Chatbots that can answer a balance query but cannot actually process a dispute or update a mandate have limited value; agents that can complete the full workflow inside bank-grade compliance controls are a different category of product. Expect more banking software vendors to acquire specialist agentic AI teams over the next year, and expect procurement conversations at banks to shift from evaluating chatbots to evaluating end-to-end resolution rates.

The Debia angle: The Backbase-Kasisto deal reinforces a pattern Debia tracks closely across the industry: AI is most valuable in regulated finance when it is embedded with governance and audit trails from day one, not bolted on afterwards. The institutions that will benefit most from agentic AI are the ones that can guarantee every automated action is explainable, compliant and reversible if needed. That is exactly the standard we hold payment infrastructure to at Debia, and it is the same discipline that will separate genuinely useful banking AI from AI that merely looks impressive in a demo.

DBS and Grab Become Founding Partners of Open USD

Among the more than 140 founding partners named in Open Standard’s Open USD launch, two names stand out for Southeast Asia: DBS Bank, Singapore’s largest bank by assets, and Grab, the region’s biggest ride-hailing, delivery and financial super app. Both appear in Open Standard’s official partner list published on 30 June, alongside Standard Chartered and Commonwealth Bank of Australia as the other major Asia-Pacific-linked financial institutions in the founding cohort. Neither DBS nor Grab has published a standalone statement detailing its specific role, but their inclusion as day-one partners places Singapore’s largest bank and Southeast Asia’s largest consumer platform inside the governance structure of what could become one of the most widely distributed dollar stablecoins in the world.

The significance is structural as much as symbolic. DBS has spent the past several years building out digital asset custody, tokenised bond issuance and cross-border payment infrastructure under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s regulatory perimeter, positioning itself as the region’s reference bank for regulated digital assets. Grab, meanwhile, sits at the centre of everyday consumer and merchant payments across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines through its wallet, lending and merchant services businesses. If OUSD gains real transaction volume once it launches later in 2026, having both a leading regional bank and a leading regional super app already inside the governance board gives Singapore and Southeast Asia more direct influence over the token’s design and rollout than most other single markets in the world.

Why it matters: Singapore has consistently positioned itself as a rule-setter rather than a rule-taker in digital assets, and DBS and Grab’s inclusion in OUSD’s founding cohort extends that pattern to the biggest stablecoin governance experiment yet attempted. For merchants and financial institutions across ASEAN, it signals that whatever token or rail wins the next phase of the stablecoin race, the region will not be a passive adopter. Expect more Southeast Asian banks and platforms to seek founding-partner status in similar consortium efforts going forward, treating early governance seats as strategic assets in their own right.

The Debia angle: This is precisely the kind of positioning Debia watches for, and it echoes what we believe about the region’s trajectory: Southeast Asia’s biggest institutions increasingly earn a seat at the table when global financial infrastructure gets rebuilt, rather than waiting to integrate whatever emerges. For merchants and partners working with Debia, the practical takeaway is that the settlement rails available in the region are likely to expand and diversify quickly over the next 12 to 18 months, and payment infrastructure that can route intelligently across that expanding set of options, rather than betting on a single stablecoin, will be the infrastructure worth building on.

At Debia, we track these changes because the future of payments will be shaped by speed, trust, interoperability, and smarter financial infrastructure. We do not just process payments. We understand the infrastructure, regulation, technology, and market shifts behind the future of digital commerce, and we build for where the ecosystem is heading next.