Everyone is arguing about whose dollar is better. That’s the wrong argument.

In late June, Open Standard launched Open USD with more than 140 partners behind it, names like Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and BlackRock. Circle's stock fell 13% the same day, and the market was right to flinch.

A regulated dollar is a commodity. The asset is distribution, and Open USD showed up with more of it than anyone in the market. Our general partner, Alex Witt, has made this case for years, so we will make it again. Distribution is king.

Circle already proved the point, and they proved it by accident. In May, to keep USDC as the quoted asset on Hyperliquid, it agreed to hand the exchange up to 90% of the reserve yield on the USDC parked there. Analysts put the hit at $60M to $80M in annual EBITDA for Circle and Coinbase combined.

That number gives it away. Circle handed over nine-tenths of the economics to keep its dollar on one venue. Owners keep the economics, vendors give them away. Circle makes the dollar, and someone else decides where it lives.

Open USD took Circle's accident and turned it into the business model. Where Circle cut one distribution deal under pressure, Open USD cut 140 of them on purpose and bundled them into a token before it even launched.

The partners run from Shopify and DoorDash to Google, American Express, and Solana, and Open USD hands most of its reserve earnings back to them. The companies that own the checkout pages, the cards, and the apps also own the economics. That is the design, and it’s a smart one.

Circle spent a decade and a slice of its margin buying reach. Open USD started with it.

First-mover status is worth less than Circle's price implies. Being early and compliant carried USDC this far, but Open USD copies the compliance and skips the wait, because it arrives with the distribution already attached.

The token is a commodity, so the moat has to be reach, and reach is the one thing a 140-partner coalition brings on day one. We think Open USD takes a real bite out of Circle in developed-market payments over the next few years.

Circle's CEO would say we have it backwards, and he makes the strongest version of the case.

He’s partly right, and we will give him his due. USDC cleared close to $30T on-chain last quarter, roughly 80% of dollar-stablecoin volume, and it is the only large stablecoin licensed across both the EU and Japan. A launch-day partner list does not buy a decade of liquidity.

So both things are true. Circle's moat is real, and Open USD still arrives with more distribution than any challenger before it. Given the choice, we would own the distribution over the dollar every time.

Open USD's list is softer than the logos suggest. A partner list is only as good as the commitments behind it, and a few of these are shaky. Tony Chung reported that of the 13 Korean firms named as partners, several say they were signed up without agreeing. Samsung called the listing news to it. Shinhan, Dunamu (Upbit), and K Bank say they were asked, said they would look at it, and then read their own names in the announcement.

Omid Malekan of Columbia called this the "logo spray and pray" phase, and he is onto something. Adding a logo is cheap. Owning the flow of real dollars is expensive, and it is the only thing that decides this.

In the corridors we invest in, this fight barely lands. USDT is the default dollar across Lagos, Buenos Aires, and Karachi, because that is what the local exchange, the merchant, and the peer-to-peer trader already use. Years of liquidity and habit hold it there, and a new logo in New York moves almost none of it.

Reaching those users takes licensed local rails, and that ground game is far harder to build than a partner list. Yellow Card already moves people in and out of dollars across more than 20 African markets. That is a moat that actually holds.

Every new developed-market issuer, Open USD included, makes the licensed distribution rails in emerging markets more valuable, rather than less. Atum Labs is building the interoperability layer that helps different stablecoins move across those rails.

The issuers fight over whose dollar sits on the balance sheet. The rails decide which dollar reaches the person on the ground, and they get paid for deciding. Fonbnk turns airtime into stablecoins in cash economies and collects on every transaction.

They can fight over the token. We would rather own the last mile. Distribution is king, and the only question worth asking about any stablecoin is which distribution it actually owns.

Every week we share insights into the stablecoin infrastructure landscape. Those exact insights come from our interactive dashboard called Stablescape.

Today, the platform tracks ~3,500 companies across 137 countries, helping us identify where the next generation of financial infrastructure is being built. Explore the dataset:

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Disclosure: Verda Ventures may hold positions in companies named here. Tether is an anchor investor in our fund. For informational purposes only, not investment advice.