Open Issuance

The thesis that stablecoins will not stay dominated by a small number of issuers forever, that companies acting in economic self-interest will issue their own stablecoins, and that market structure will shift from a duopoly toward thousands of issuers.

The core argument

Zach Abrams' framing: "Everybody who's sitting on top of money, they should issue a stablecoin. That's the market, all money at rest."¹ There are four independent economic reasons to issue your own stablecoin rather than hold someone else's.

Yield. If a product or business requires customers to hold stablecoin balances, the company is currently earning nothing on those balances, or whatever the issuer does not pass through, while the incumbent issuer earns roughly 4 to 5 percent on the reserves backing them. On a hundred million dollars or more of balances, that is millions of dollars a year in profit flowing to the issuer instead of the company. Any fintech sitting on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of stablecoin balances can, in principle, simply swap to its own stablecoin and earn that yield itself.¹

Chain control. Owning your own stablecoin means choosing where it lives. If a company wants to build on a new chain, it can make its stablecoin available there directly, rather than depending on an external issuer's decision to deploy on that chain first.

Platform independence. Building a product on someone else's stablecoin is structurally similar to building a platform business entirely on top of a much larger company's infrastructure: the terms can change once the smaller party's dependence grows. Once a large platform is built on a specific stablecoin, the issuer holds real leverage over it.

Product control. A company's own stablecoin moves with its own product decisions, guaranteeing availability wherever the roadmap goes, a new chain, a new product, a new market, without needing to negotiate with or wait on an external issuer.

Why it was not already happening

Perceived risk was too high. Issuing a stablecoin meant regulatory ambiguity, uncertainty over whether an issuer would be treated as a bank, a money transmitter, or something new, technical complexity, and reputational risk in an environment where major stablecoin issuer failures, Terra LUNA foremost, were still fresh in memory. The GENIUS Act changed the calculus: an official government statement that stablecoins are legitimate dropped the perceived risk while the economic case remained exactly as strong, and enterprises became willing to act on it.¹

Adoption wave

The first wave is crypto-native early adopters already moving to their own issuance, including Phantom, the leading Solana wallet, MetaMask, the leading Ethereum wallet, and Hyperliquid, the perpetuals trading platform.¹ The second wave is fintechs already sitting on large stablecoin balances, global neobanks and remittance apps that will swap to their own issuance chiefly for the yield. The third, still emerging, wave is corporate treasuries: large global companies with multi-entity treasury operations that today move money through a chain of SWIFT settlements, from the US to Ireland to Singapore to Brazil in one worked example, and could instead tokenize treasury operations directly, with a strong preference for their own stablecoin so balances are not commingled and yield stays captured internally.

What happens to the incumbent issuers

Open issuance does not kill the largest incumbent stablecoin issuer outright, since its trading-use-case network effects are entrenched and it does not need to pay yield to maintain them. But the trading use case, which was effectively one hundred percent of the stablecoin market two years earlier and is already down to roughly eighty percent today, is expected to shrink toward something closer to five percent in the years ahead even as the market itself expands enormously; the incumbent's absolute position stays intact while its relative share declines.¹ The expectation among open-issuance advocates is that the dominant issuer's share falls from something like 60 to 70 percent of the market to something closer to 10 percent, not because the incumbent shrinks in absolute terms but because thousands of new issuers now sit alongside it.¹

What open issuance requires

For a market of thousands of issuers to work, interoperability is non-negotiable. Stablecoins need to recede into infrastructure and become seamlessly convertible into one another, so that moving between one wallet's stablecoin and another's becomes as trivial as moving between two bank accounts, and settles as cash from the user's point of view without the user ever seeing the stablecoin itself.¹

Connections

Open issuance depends on infrastructure platforms that make issuing a compliant stablecoin cheap and fast, and it is enabled directly by the regulatory clarity that made US enterprises willing to act on economics that had been true for years. It represents the many-issuers side of a broader shift in financial infrastructure from bespoke bilateral integrations toward a smaller number of shared, interoperable primitives.