Visa CEO Ryan McInerney is refusing to cast the company's newest stablecoin bet as a shot at the market's incumbents. Asked on an earnings call this week whether Open USD (OUSD) could challenge Circle's USDC and Tether's USDT, McInerney kept his answer deliberately neutral.
“Visa, going forward, will remain multi-coin, multi-chain. Our role is not to pick winners,” McInerney said on the call. “Our role is to help clients connect to the stablecoin ecosystem securely and at scale, regardless of which stablecoin, which network, which infrastructure ultimately gains adoption.”
A Consortium of More Than 140 Companies
Visa's stablecoin involvement traces back to last month, when it joined more than 140 companies — including Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock and Coinbase — in backing Open Standard, the consortium behind the planned OUSD launch later this year. The scale of that backing fueled speculation that OUSD was being built as a direct challenger to the two dominant dollar-pegged stablecoins.
Part of OUSD's pitch to distribution partners is its reserve-income model: businesses can mint and redeem the token without fees or volume limits, while partners collect the earnings generated by the reserves backing it, minus a small management fee — a structure that differs from how USDC and USDT currently share revenue with distributors.
Analysts Split on What Visa Actually Wants
Wall Street has not read McInerney's neutrality the same way. Mizuho downgraded Circle over the threat it sees from OUSD, while analysts Dan Dolev and Alexander Jenkins described Visa's positioning as that of a “stablecoin of stablecoins” — a central network that profits regardless of which digital dollar ultimately wins, since a proliferation of interchangeable stablecoins would only increase demand for the rails connecting them.
Not everyone is convinced Visa is fully behind OUSD's success. Ark Invest's Lorenzo Valente argued the commitment looks more like a soft letter of intent than a strategic bet. “It is becoming increasingly clear that the commitment from OUSD’s partners is closer to a soft LOI than a strategic bet,” Valente said. “Of course they will support it. But supporting OUSD is very different from committing meaningful resources, distribution, or balance sheet to making it win.”
“Visa won’t support any stablecoin, as stablecoins will kill their business. They are part of alliances only to slow them down.” — Mikko Ohtamaa, CEO and co-founder of Trading Strategy
Stablecoins Still Searching for Scale
McInerney was careful to temper expectations about how far stablecoins have actually progressed. “As much as we talk about stablecoins on this call and in other venues, stablecoins really have yet to scale beyond a few use cases like stablecoin-linked cards,” he said. Visa launched an internal platform earlier this month meant to make it easier for banks and fintechs to integrate stablecoins, starting with OUSD support, even as the company insists it isn't betting the house on any single token winning the category.
