A few weeks ago we wrote about the launch Open USD — a stablecoin consortium of more than 140 companies, including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock and Coinbase. The project was positioned as a new standard for global payments, and Circle lost more than 16% of its capitalization on the day of the announcement.

However, on July 3, the situation cracked. The Korean edition of Chosun Biz found out that several South Korean companies from the OUSD partner list did not confirm any formal participation. Samsung Electronics stated that there were no official negotiations with Open Standard. Dunamu, the operator of the largest exchange Upbit, directly denied involvement in the token issuance. Shinhan Financial Group and K Bank reported that they had only agreed to consider the proposal — and unexpectedly found themselves on the list of full-fledged partners. One of the company representatives admitted that he learned about his inclusion from the news.

Tether advisor Gabor Gurbacs spoke with several companies from the list and confirmed: none had signed contracts or given formal consent. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire limited himself to a succinct post: «Integrity matters».

It is important to understand: Western anchor participants — Stripe, Coinbase, Visa and BlackRock — did not deny their participation. The scandal concerns specifically the Korean segment of 13 organizations, not the project as a whole. Nevertheless, for a consortium whose main trump card is the scale of the alliance, such a start is extremely inconvenient. Analysts are already drawing parallels with Facebook Libra 2019, which also debuted with a loud list of partners — and closed in 2022.

Open Standard has not officially commented on the situation yet. The real answer to the question about the scale of the consortium will be given by only one indicator — the volume of transactions after the launch in the second half of 2026.

#OUSD
#OpenUSD
#Samsung
#Dunamu
#Shinhan
#KBank
#stablecoin
#consortium
#cryptocurrency
#Brick