Many reached out asking for my thoughts on @openstandard announcement. I decided to share my personal reading, and, more importantly, put it in context with my vision of the world. First, the announcement. @stripe / @Stablecoin is not new to extremely powerful announcements—nor to announcements where evidence didn’t necessarily follow. Some will remember October 2025's Open Issuance, Bridge's open issuance platform that was meant to be a technology letting companies issue their own stablecoins, overall with limited adoption—albeit in a challenging market. Open USD is an iteration of the same vision with the opposite architecture: no longer a modular platform, but a single purpose-built entity (called Open Standard) issuing one single token, OUSD, with governance and economics shared among participants. The emphasis has shifted from technology to shared reserve economics, free mint / redeem, aggregated liquidity, and a governance promise that remains without specifics. The partner list is impressive on paper (140+ of the most powerful names), but its quality is harder to assess given its heterogeneity, as far as we know: (i) some partners have communicated strong commitments to embedding OUSD in their flows, (ii) others have signaled a lukewarm desire to support on X, (iii) others still (who shall remain unnamed) have expressed disappointment through various channels at being listed as implied supporters. This is, for all practical purposes, a list of signed Letters of Intent to collaborate. My honest read is that this will not be a 140-company consortium: it is most probably a @stripe + @Visa + @Mastercard initiative with an aggressive economic rebate attached, and everyone else is in that announcement for a different reason. We should be intellectually honest: OUSD might, in the long run, be a powerful force and a genuinely compelling alternative to @circle's USDC for specific use cases. This is Stripe indexing on convenience, and there is a real market for convenience. Today, however, convenience still points to USDC. A tokenized, fragmented future. At @m0 we underwrote, years ago, a vision of the world that has been materializing, albeit more slowly than expected: most money will migrate to tokenized form (whether stablecoins or bank deposits) and it will not sit on one balance sheet. Regulation, competitive dynamics in payments and banking, and the economics of self-issuance all point to a monetary base fragmented across many issuers and many balance sheets. Open USD is, ironically, the strongest confirmation of this thesis to date. Whether liquidity and acceptance are dominated by one company willing to give away economics when required (like Circle today) or by a handful of consortia, the incentive to deviate remains. It is our conviction that fragmentation will increase, not decrease: more proprietary dollars, more counter-consortia, more balance sheets. In such a world, value creation does not reside in rent-seeking NIM retention (issuance itself is a race to the bottom) but in the layer that connects the liability claim (the money) to what it can do: inter-issuer settlement, global sophisticated payments, stablecoin-centric financial experiences, crypto, agentic commerce, geographical distribution, and more. @m0 is building, alongside a handful of others—including many of the signatories of the Open USD initiative, to thrive on fragmentation, by unifying and settling this growing plurality of instruments rather than competing with any of them. Our conviction remains that this productive connective tissue won't be built on announcements and paper alliances, but on technology. The future. 2026 has so far been a lateral, weird, market, in stablecoin-land: an enormous amount of positioning has been signaled (including by @m0) while very little new volume has actually materialized. Lateral markets are where narratives get sold. The Open USD announcement is reminding us that most of the largest financial infrastructure companies in the world are heavily investing in what is the deepest paradigmatic shift in finance we will observe in our lifetimes. While this makes the journey more challenging from a mindshare perspective, it confirms that the main asset of companies like @m0, through which we will continue to grow relevance, attract resources, and increase our financial value, will remain the technology we build ahead of everyone else. Onwards.