Zubin: Tether makes billions of dollars in profit with fewer than 200 employees. That business model died this week.
Aman: SWIFT has never moved a single dollar. In 50 years, it moves messages — the money crawls behind it.
Zubin: Meta tried to dominate by force. Open Standard is attempting to build a neutral utility everyone already owns a piece of.
Aman: Circle is the content. Mastercard and Stripe are the distribution. And Zubin, distribution eats content for breakfast every single day.
Zubin, here's what happened while America was hanging the buntings for its 250th birthday. A consortium called Open Standard announced Open USD, a new dollar stablecoin backed by more than 140 institutions. You name it: Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, Stripe. The day it landed, Circle's market cap fell 16%. One-sixth of the company, gone.
Zubin: Yeah, and Aman — Tether, the biggest stablecoin on earth, sitting at what, 185 billion — doesn't have a share price to fall, but its business model just took the same bullet.
Aman: Because Open USD does one deceptively simple thing. The interest earned on the reserves — the float — that made Tether and Circle two of the most profitable companies per employee in financial history, no longer belongs to the issuer. It gets handed back to the partners who distribute the token.
Zubin: So in the next half hour or so, we'll explain exactly how that mechanism works, why it echoes something an American visionary did in — what, 1980? Oh, sorry — 1968, I should say — and why this may be the beginning of the end for SWIFT itself.
Aman: Yeah, stick around for that last one. But first, Zubin — I believe a certain country just had a birthday, and it looks like you're celebrating it in true style, and a certain other country just ruined a stadium's forty-year-old party.
Zubin: Aman Narain, you sound like a man running on four hours of sleep and, I don't know, four double espressos.
Aman: Well, one very—
Zubin: Yeah.
Aman: —large Americano, in your honour. Is exactly the chemistry — I regret nothing. I landed, you know, Zubin, after 11 hours literally to this call from Athens. Two weeks in Greece — it started with a dear friend's 50th in the mountains of Pelion, the mother of all parties — and then a week sailing the Aegean Sea. But honestly, Zubin, the jet lag is only like 30% of it. The other substance coursing through my veins is—
Zubin: Let me guess — a certain match at the Estadio Azteca?
Aman: That's right. England beat Mexico at the Azteca. Do you understand what that building is? It's like 105,000 Mexicans. Altitude, smoke, 40 years of visiting teams walking out of there in pieces. No visiting side had won there since 2013. And England — my England — went into the cathedral of CONCACAF at this World Cup and absolutely silenced it.
Zubin: First of all, friend — congratulations to the English team, genuinely. I watched this game, I'd probably say arguably one of the best games of the season. It was really a historical result. Second of all, it's soccer. This is the World Cup on our continent, and Team USA thanks England for warming up the trophy before we surprise everyone and take it.
Aman: Yeah, right — this is coming from a guy who gets the sport's name completely wrong. Zee, formerly Zed—
Zubin: I say Zee because it's correct, my friend. You say football, I say soccer — one of us is absolutely right, and one of us is living in the past. Meanwhile, some of us were actually working while you lived out your sports epic. I was on a cruise, what, maybe two weeks ago? And I gently had to check my own camera roll to confirm that. The cruise has been fully amortised from my memory — straight-line depreciation over 14 days.
Aman: Stops for you, Zubin. But here's the ultimate truce, and our listeners in Mumbai already know this. The only team the two of us actually agree on wears blue and plays cricket. Two diehard cricket fans — one flying an England flag in football, one flying the Stars and Stripes in soccer. Yeah.
Zubin: That. Well — three flags, one currency, one King Kohli. But speaking of those flags, let's talk about the massive birthday the one over my house just had.
Aman: Yeah, that fourth of July — America's 250th birthday, the semiquincentennial. For the record, on that exact day I was standing on the deck of a boat in the Aegean, in the country that invented democracy, raising a glass of ouzo to the country that scaled it, genuinely. And as a British national, whose people you declared independence from 250 years ago, here I am toasting the occasion. I guess time heals.
Zubin: As a diehard Californian on this show, I accept your surrender on behalf of the Republic. I actually watched the fireworks over the Bay, and looking at them, kept thinking: what was the actual structural export of that revolution? Everyone talks about liberty, everyone talks about the Constitution, maybe even throw in Hollywood. But if you're a payments geek like the two of us, the most successful American export of the last century is the dollar itself.
Aman: You know, I wrote a blog from that boat last week and shared that — we could throw that in the show notes. But I think it's a perfect runway into today's real story, because last month we told you America was hosting two World Cups: one on the pitch, one on Wall Street. Today is the financial sequel, where — while England was making history at the Azteca — 140 institutions were quietly making history with the digital dollar. We are diving into stablecoins, explained properly, from Tether and USDT to the plumbing of a brand-new OS.
Zubin: Aman — before we dial in, you know what's supposed to come here: the disclaimer. Friends, this podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. The views are our own, not those of any organisations we're linked with. And of course, nothing here is financial advice.
Aman: Right. Let's light that fuse, Zubin.
Zubin: Right, Aman — you said this echoes 1968. Everyone knows 1776. Nobody knows 1968. So why don't you set the scene?
Aman: Yeah, sure — glad you asked. Well, picture America in 1968. Not quite two hundred years old. Its banking system is a mess of competing colonies all over again. Every bank issuing its own proprietary paper credit, no shared infrastructure, transaction costs through the roof, settlement takes weeks. And along comes a visionary — your favourite man, Dee Hock — who looks at this and has a genuinely revolutionary idea. Not a bigger bank, a decentralised consortium. Competing institutions agreeing on a single protocol. He calls it Visa. It becomes the ultimate moat, because owning the shared rails beats owning any single issuer's product.
Zubin: You know, it's such an American story, right? Thirteen quarrelsome colonies federated under one constitution. Yeah, we have thousands — probably thousands — of quarrelsome banks federated under one network. E pluribus unum, but for money.
Aman: I agree. True. And this week — I love the Latin — and this week, it's probably the only Latin most of America speaks.
Zubin: Yeah. That is it. That is it.
Aman: And this week, the stablecoin market had its Dee Hock moment. Zach Abrams, the Bridge co-founder, now interim CEO of Open Standard, unveiled Open USD — a dollar-pegged consortium stablecoin backed by over 140 giants, as we said. And here's the real twist: Visa and Mastercard aren't the victims — they're the co-founders, Zubin—
Zubin: Yeah — and this pays off our Season One finale, where we pitted Circle and Tether against Visa and Mastercard, and flagged that stablecoin settlement volume had surpassed, I think, Visa's network volume. We called stablecoins the internet of value. And you had predicted that the networks would co-opt the tech and settle on-chain. Open Standard is that prediction playing out.
Aman: If you thought Stripe buying Bridge for $1.1 billion, or Mastercard buying BVNK for $1.8 billion, was the peak of the arms race — think again. This is the incumbent empire striking back to re-bundle the entire system.
Zubin: For 50 years, the card networks owned the relationship because they owned the rules of the road. Crypto unbundled that. And by backing an open, multi-partner standard, the giants are re-bundling the ecosystem on their terms. You don't want to rent somebody else's token — you want to run the network that orchestrates how tokens move.
Aman: And hold that thought, because in a few minutes we'll show you that exact mechanism — and it involves giving away billions of dollars a year, on purpose. But first, Zubin — why don't you teach the audience how stablecoin issuers actually make money?
Zubin: I need to get my Prof Z hat on. Maybe we should have a hat for this.
Aman: You sure do.
Zubin: Aman, here's the whole business model in four steps, and it's beautiful while it lasts. Step one: you hand Tether or Circle real dollars. Step two: they mint you stablecoins. Step three: they take those dollars and plonk them into short-term US Treasuries. And step four: they essentially pocket 100% of that interest. That's the float.
Tether makes billions of dollars in profit with fewer than 200 employees. The end users and distribution partners carry all the friction. A single issuer holds all the yield. That business model died this week.
Aman: So, Prof Z — that was amazing, but let's just make this as easy as pie. Can you give us a layman's — how does this work in layman's terms?
Zubin: All right, I'll try. So think of a — I don't know — a giant global amusement park. You exchange real dollars for park tokens. I was at Disneyland recently, so this kind of analogy is starting to make a little more sense. And you take these park tokens to ride on roller coasters. The park owner, in this case, would take those real dollars and put them into, I don't know, a high-yield savings account, and then just pocket millions in interest. Meanwhile, you're holding these tokens that essentially earn you nothing. Tether and Circle are the amusement parks, getting a free ride on your cash. Open Standard now walks into the room and says, "You know what — rides are free, and we'll share the interest with the travel agents that brought you here."
Aman: Yeah. You know, given the season, allow me the British framing. Two hundred and fifty years ago, colonists watched a distant power collect rent on their commerce without a say, and dumped a bunch of tea into the Boston Harbor. That's what's happening this week. It's like the Boston Tea Party of stablecoins. A hundred and forty institutions looked at Tether and Circle collecting the entire float — taxation without representation in economics — and dumped—
Zubin: You—
Aman: —the whole single-issuer model into the harbour. No float without representation.
Zubin: That's true — a Brit rewriting American revolutionary slogans. First you win the Azteca, now this. Leave us something else.
Aman: Issuance is necessary but no longer sufficient as a standalone product. You know this very well — you make a killing on interest when rates are high, but you have to defend those deposits. And I don't think we've thought that through enough. Distribution is king in payments.
Zubin: Distribution is king in payments — that's the keyword, and that's the precise artery that Open Standard cuts. What if the reserve earnings flow back to the partners driving distribution? Not a sovereign corporate issuer.
Aman: Yep. And so I think coming up we should cover the three specific mechanisms that make Open USD almost impossible for a corporate treasurer to refuse, including the one that removes the ten-million-dollar daily ceiling, which I think is kind of important. Okay, so let's go there, Zubin. Three mechanisms. Number one: free minting. Zero cost, no volume caps — the premium entry friction is gone.
Zubin: And if I can just interrupt you for a second — the "no volume caps" bit is bigger than it sounds, right? So, take Circle: caps standard daily redemptions at $10 million, and charges overage surcharges past certain monthly thresholds. Tether won't talk to you below $100,000, and takes a flat — what, 0.1%? — bite on every creation or withdrawal. Open Standard says to corporate treasurers: the gates are open, wide open. Move what you want, at absolute scale, for free.
Aman: Yeah, it's brilliant. Okay, so mechanism two: the yield flip. Interest on reserves doesn't just sit in Open Standard's account — it's distributed back to the 140-plus partners, which are now very motivated, by volume they drive.
Zubin: This is again pure genius, right? It commoditised the token layer, turning issuance into a telecom-scale utility play. Stripe's Will Gaybrick had already said Open USD will be the default stablecoin on Stripe. With Bridge inside Stripe's infrastructure, that pipeline is instantaneous.
Aman: I just think — I love the way Stripe straddles both the new economy and the old economy. It's just incredible. Now, mechanism number three is the freeze-out. Circle, Tether, and PayPal were explicitly excluded from this consortium. The incumbents are locking arms to protect their tollways, essentially.
Circle is the content — Mastercard and Stripe are the distribution. And Zubin, distribution eats content for breakfast every single day.
History is unambiguous on this. By aligning incentives with the intermediaries, they have frozen the independent issuer token out from the primary checkout.
Zubin: And some listeners are old enough to remember a tech giant already tried a global consortium currency, and I think it died in the crib. Why is this time different? And I can hear people already typing, "this is just Libra again," right now.
Aman: Yes — Libra, Calibra, whatever you want to call it. Hold that comment. You're half right, and the half that's wrong is the whole story. Okay, so as Open Standard rallies 140-plus giants, I keep glancing at the corporate graveyard of digital currencies, Zubin—
Zubin: Alright.
Aman: You know, specifically, as we mentioned, Meta's 2019 Libra, later rebranded Diem. The tech press is drawing heavy parallels, but there's a profound structural difference in why Open Standard wins here while Zuckerberg fails.
Zubin: You know, it's centralised hubris versus open-standard neutrality. Like, when a proprietary giant tries forcing closed operating systems down everyone's throat, the industry rallied around Linux as an example — mutual shared infrastructure, no single monarch owning it.
Aman: True. That's a big deal for America — no more kings. Libra—
Zubin: —finished.
Aman: —failed because it was essentially the antithesis of that. A closed garden, dictated by a single social media monopoly. The moment Facebook stamped it, regulators panicked, and they killed it in the cradle. Under pressure, its early heavyweights — Visa, Mastercard, Stripe — similar people involved here, walked away from that table.
Zubin: That's right. Open Standard is playing the opposite hand. Not a Facebook — going back to the Linux of stablecoins, right? Neutral, multi-stakeholder governance, decisions guided by a partner board.
Aman: Yeah, and it flips the script in four ways. Shared governance versus monopoly control; a favourable regulatory environment with frameworks like the GENIUS Act, which we've talked about; aligned network economics, if you'd like, rewarding distribution — really important part of payments; and bringing together industry consensus. And then the very networks that fled Diem are now co-founders, alongside American Express, Coinbase, BlackRock, Google.
Zubin: Yeah, I would almost go on to say that Meta tried to dominate by force. Open Standard is attempting to build a neutral utility everyone already owns a piece of. And it sort of turns bitter competitors into allies.
Aman: You know, Zubin, sticking with our theme — a founding fathers' footnote. The American Constitution endured because it was written to survive its authors. Checks, balances, no kings. Libra was a monarchy. Open Standard wrote itself a constitution. One more thing.
Zubin: What was it? What is it?
Aman: Did you catch that NPR report from June 30th? Meta held secret talks, allegedly, to buy Kalshi — which we covered on the show — the prediction market platform. Talks reportedly collapsed over Kalshi's regulatory challenges. So Meta pivoted to an internal points-based prediction app called Arena — the play-money grandson, if you'd like, of Calibra.
Zubin: Crazy, crazy. It's almost as if he could never say die. Boxed out of stablecoins, blocked by regulators, and immediately building a parallel economy out of play-money prediction markets. Somewhere in Menlo Park, there's a whiteboard that just says, "currency, somehow."
Aman: Yeah — in Zuck we trust.
Zubin: All right.
Aman: We've covered who wins and why. What does this mean, Zubin, for the person actually buying and selling things? Let's land the plane. Okay, so we've mapped the phases of stablecoin utility before — short-term yield for issuers, medium-term corporate treasurers — but the holy grail has always been retail merchant acceptance. Does this accelerate that, Zubin Vandrevala?
Zubin: You know, my prediction is it kicks the door off its hinges, right? Until now, merchant acceptance was clunky — fragmented assets, expensive on- and off-ramps, point-of-sale systems that don't speak on-chain.
Aman: Yeah, I need to — by the way, just a sidebar — this "door off its hinges" has become your favourite term. I need to check in with the folks at Gravy and call your wife to make sure everybody's alright at your end of the pond.
Zubin: You know, Aman, there's a laundry list of them, and I'll just add this to that list.
Aman: Yeah. Let me make this concrete. It takes all three of our flags we've talked about, plus cricket. I was recently in India — as you and I talked about — we're talking about the magic of UPI, and essentially ordering a basic electronics component from the company Zepto, paid for it on Google Pay instantly, and it arrives at my parents' door in precisely six minutes. You know, domestic—
Zubin: Yeah.
Aman: —payments in India operate in the 21st century. Cross-border commerce into that same market crawls through correspondent networks at 19th-century speeds.
Zubin: And the gap is exactly what this architecture closes. Imagine Open USD integrated into Stripe's global merchant base, settled via Mastercard and Visa's terminals, native in Google Pay. The stablecoin stops being speculative and becomes the invisible real-time settlement layer for global trade.
Aman: Yeah, and the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old echo again — America's first great infrastructure acts were all postal roads, then railroads, then the interstate highways. Re-laying the roads commerce runs on every fifty years or so. Except this time the roads are invisible, and the tolls, as we've talked about on the show multiple times, flow backwards and forwards to whoever brings the traffic, whether you're a human or an agent.
Zubin: That's so true. Which brings us to the ultimate macro chess match — tee you up as always. You've already conquered the Azteca this week. Go ahead and conquer Basel. When you look at the lineup, this isn't an upgrade for digital checkouts. It's a re-architecting of the global banking grid. How deep does this rabbit hole go?
Aman: You know, Zubin, it goes right to the foundation. This is the ultimate plumber's dilemma. Take SWIFT and correspondent banking. SWIFT has never moved a single dollar. In 50 years, it moves messages — the money crawls behind it. It's a multi-hop game — funds bouncing bank to bank, trapping liquidity in Nostro accounts, taking days to settle. Open USD bypasses all of that. Immediate settlement, 24/7, 365. And because Open Standard shares reserve interest with partners, platforms now have a hard incentive to route around SWIFT entirely. Why pay the legacy plumbers when the new plumbing gives you a cut of the profits?
Zubin: That's an interesting thought. So it's an incentive loop designed to starve legacy infrastructure of the volume. But Aman, what about the BIS, defending central banking sovereignty from private stablecoins? We've talked about this before.
Aman: I mean, you could argue that Open USD is the BIS's worst nightmare, and it exposes the macro divide — we covered this on our National Rails episode — but the Global South and ASEAN are building some incredible public infrastructure and real-time rails, projects like Nexus, we've talked about that, to protect monetary sovereignty and bypass Western-dominated networks.
Zubin: That's exactly right. Yeah, a state-backed alternative to keep the plumbing public and local, I guess.
Aman: And Open Standard is the Wall Street plus Silicon Valley private-sector counteroffensive, right? Like, by locking arms with BlackRock, Visa, Google, the US dollar on private institutional rails remains the default global operating system for trade — short-circuiting the BIS's vision. It even pushes IBANs to the periphery — much loved as they are in my part of the world — relegating legacy accounts to local on- and off-ramps while the heavy lifting moves—
Zubin: All right, I'm going to land it. Bring us back to the birthday.
Aman: Okay, so two hundred and fifty years ago, thirteen colonies declared independence from a distant empire that taxed their commerce and controlled their trade routes. This week, 140 institutions signed what I'd call the digital dollar's second Declaration of Independence. Independence from SWIFT, from the correspondent maze, from the single-issuer float. And notice who's holding the pen. Not the rebels this time, Zubin. The empire itself — Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock. David Marcus said it best at Stablecon: money is like water, it always finds the path of least resistance. Open Standard just carved the slickest riverbed the digital dollar has ever seen. The era of the isolated issuer hoarding the treasury yield is over. The era of institutional, embedded orchestration has just begun. Happy 250th, America. Your dollar just got some new rails.
Zubin: Boom! For a man who took the Azteca and BIS in the same week — the founders would be confused but grateful. Okay, that's a wrap. Drop us a line: will Open USD become the new global financial operating system, or can the legacy rails fight back? Until next time — keep your rails fast.
Aman: And your currency is stable. Stay curious, stay purposeful, and — as Zubin would say — stay drip. See you next week, right here on A to Z.
Zubin: Or as I would say — A to Zee.