Introduction｜
The arrival of Open USD shifts stablecoin competition from a scramble for market share among crypto startups to a contest over infrastructure in which traditional finance, payment networks, technology platforms, and public-chain ecosystems all take part together. Around this new alliance involving more than 140 institutions, scholar Hu Yilin argues that stablecoins are not the moderate wing of the crypto revolution, but rather something like the “loyalist reformers” inside the old monetary system: they inherit the efficiency of blockchains while preserving the central position of the dollar and the Federal Reserve. The real crypto revolution, in the end, still has to return to a more fundamental question: must market life depend on the central bank as the center of monetary order?
Open USD Arrives: Stablecoins Move from Product Competition to Alliance Infrastructure
On June 30, Open Standard announced the launch of Open USD, a dollar stablecoin designed for global capital flows. According to the official introduction, Open USD focuses on three features: enterprises can mint and redeem it at zero cost; reserve income, after deducting a small management fee, is distributed to partners; and it is operated by Open Standard, an independent company, with a board composed of partners participating in governance. The list of participants spans payments, banking, technology, and crypto industries, including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, OCBC, Google, Shopify, Coinbase, Solana, Base, Ripple, MetaMask, Aave, and others.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Open USD plans to be available later this year on networks such as Base and Solana, and that about 140 companies have already signed on to use it; the report also noted that USDT and USDC remain the two largest stablecoins for now, with a combined market capitalization of about $260 billion. Barron’s, meanwhile, noted that after Open USD was announced, the share prices of related companies such as Circle and Coinbase came under pressure, because the new alliance directly threatens the stablecoin business model in which USDC sits.
On the surface, this looks like an upgraded round of competition within the stablecoin industry: more enterprises joining, more channels being connected, and the reserve-income distribution mechanism being redesigned. But in Hu Yilin’s view, Open USD’s more important significance is not how much market share it may take from USDC or USDT, but that it reveals the historical position of stablecoins themselves: stablecoins do not truly challenge the dollar standard; they merely make the dollar standard run more efficiently.
Stablecoins Are Not the “Moderate Wing,” but the “Loyalist Reformers”
Hu Yilin supports the development of stablecoins, because stablecoins directly touch fiat currency and the banking system, and can force real political-economic structures to change. But he also stresses that supporting stablecoins as a tool does not mean acknowledging stablecoins as the finished form of the crypto revolution.
He once compared stablecoins to the Tychonic system in the Copernican Revolution: the Tychonic system absorbed many of the technical advantages of the new astronomy and could also explain more phenomena, so during the revolutionary period it was easier for traditional authority to accept; but it refused the most crucial point — it would not let the Earth start moving. Stablecoins are the same. They inherit blockchain’s clearing efficiency, programmability, global liquidity, and cross-border payment advantages, yet they refuse to let the dollar leave the center.
When speaking of Open USD, Hu Yilin further distinguishes between the “moderate wing” and the “loyalist reformers.” He says, “I think people like Michael Saylor are the real ‘moderate wing’; he also wants compatibility with the old system, but he keeps the core revolutionary point of ‘Bitcoin standard.’” In other words, the Saylor-style route can accept listed companies, accounting standards, debt financing, capital markets, and regulatory frameworks, but it still treats Bitcoin as the new base asset. It compromises with the old system, but it does not give up the revolutionary core that says “the emperor can be replaced.”
Stablecoins are different. Hu Yilin says, “Stablecoins certainly have historical significance, but they do not count as real revolutionaries.” In his view, stablecoins are more like reformers inside the old order, who believe that “the emperor (the dollar, the Federal Reserve) is good; it’s just that the execution system below is bloated and inefficient. The old Eastern Depot did a bad job, so now rely on my Western Depot to improve things.”
This metaphor sharply points to the stablecoin’s inherent limitation: it does not oppose dollar centrality, but rather the old payment systems, banking clearing networks, cross-border transfer systems, and the inefficiency of financial intermediaries. What it wants to replace is the lower-level bureaucracy, not the supreme authority.
Therefore, when the crypto revolution can only touch “execution systems” such as banks, payment companies, SWIFT, Visa, and Alipay, stablecoins and the more radical cryptocurrency route seem to point in the same direction: both oppose the old financial system’s expense, slowness, and opacity. But once the issue touches the dollar, U.S. Treasuries, the Federal Reserve, and fiat-currency standard, the divergence between the two becomes apparent. Hu Yilin says that stablecoins “start out by preventing the revolution from going deeper.” This is not to say stablecoins have no progressive significance, but rather that their progressive significance is from the very beginning limited within the old monetary order.
When the Old System Takes the Field Itself, What Is Left for Stablecoin Startups?
The special thing about Open USD is that it is not a new coin launched by a lone crypto startup team, but a consortium project jointly participated in by payment companies, banks, technology platforms, asset-management institutions, and public-chain ecosystems. Open Standard emphasizes that it wants enterprises to have greater participation in stablecoin reserve income, governance, and large-scale use.
This is exactly where Hu Yilin thinks Open USD has symbolic significance. In the past, one core narrative for dollar stablecoins was: traditional finance is too slow, too expensive, and too closed, so crypto companies need to use blockchains to improve its efficiency. But now, traditional finance and payment giants are beginning to organize stablecoin networks themselves. The old system is no longer merely the object being transformed; it has directly become the initiator and governor of stablecoin infrastructure.
Hu Yilin believes this creates a kind of irony for native stablecoin companies like Circle: if the mission of stablecoins is simply to serve the dollar system, remain compatible with the banking system, and improve payment efficiency, then when institutions like Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY, Google, and Coinbase jointly launch their own stablecoin network, the original stablecoin startups can hardly still claim that they possess an irreplaceable revolutionary legitimacy.
He frames the issue as a series of questions: who, exactly, are stablecoins trying to revolutionize? Is it SWIFT? What if interbank settlements also begin using stablecoins? Is it payment networks like Visa and Alipay? What if they themselves also accept, issue, or participate in stablecoin networks?
In his view, if the goal of stablecoins is merely to get the old system to adopt blockchain payment technology, then once the old system has adopted stablecoins, the stablecoin movement can declare victory and even ought to “retire with honor.” But if these native stablecoin companies are still unwilling to be absorbed, they must once again explain the fundamental difference between themselves and the old system.
“If you still feel unwilling to let go, then you still have to return to the path of decentralization, give up compromise, and continue the revolution,” Hu Yilin says.
Here, “drawing a line” does not necessarily take only one form. Hu Yilin does not require every project to take the Bitcoin route. One can insist on a coin standard, insist on decentralized governance, insist on censorship resistance, or insist on self-custody, immutability against freezing, open protocols, and the right to exit. But the key is that native crypto innovators must preserve some truly “disobedient” part.
“A coin standard is of course the hardest-core; emphasizing governance structure is also fine, emphasizing censorship resistance is also fine, but you have to emphasize something transgressive,” he says.
This sentence points to the awkwardness of the stablecoin narrative: when a project builds all of its selling points on compliance, efficiency, low cost, institutional friendliness, and compatibility with old finance, it will most likely not overthrow the old system, but instead be absorbed by the old system as a new department.
A Blockchain Upgrade Pack for Dollar Hegemony
Hu Yilin agrees with a broader judgment: the more successful dollar stablecoins become, the more it may not mean that crypto becomes successful; rather, it may mean that the dollar system becomes more successful.
If global cross-border e-commerce, remittances by migrants, on-chain transactions, RWA, DeFi, and enterprise settlements increasingly use dollar stablecoins, then what may be weakened is the local banking system, traditional cross-border payment networks, and some capital controls, but what is strengthened is still dollar pricing, U.S. Treasury reserves, and the U.S. regulatory framework.
Open USD is precisely the concentrated embodiment of this trend. It uses blockchains as a new track for capital flows, but the unit of value is still the dollar, the underlying yield still comes from reserve assets, and the governance structure is jointly participated in by corporate alliances and financial institutions. It is not a financial revolution against the dollar, but more like a blockchain upgrade pack for dollar hegemony.
This also explains why Hu Yilin believes stablecoins are becoming the long-term enemy of most native cryptocurrencies. The problem is not merely that stablecoins steal the function of the medium of exchange, but that they may reshape the standard structure of the on-chain world.
If the unit of account in on-chain finance is dollar stablecoins, the collateral assets are U.S. Treasuries and RWAs, the source of yield is traditional financial assets, and users’ value anchor is also the dollar, then even if on-chain activity flourishes, that does not necessarily mean the native currency of ETH, SOL, or other underlying chains has more monetary premium. The on-chain world can flourish, while wealth accumulates in off-chain dollar assets, stablecoin issuers, and traditional financial yield structures. In Hu Yilin’s earlier words, stablecoins break the logic that “the more prosperous the chain, the higher the value of the native currency,” turning it into “the more prosperous the chain, the richer the off-chain world.”
“Selling Fuel” Is Fine, but Don’t Downgrade a Civilization-Level Narrative into a Fee Narrative
The stablecoin issue has also led Hu Yilin to criticize Ethereum’s “oil” narrative once again. Many Ethereum supporters believe that even if the main on-chain means of payment are USDT, USDC, or Open USD, transactions still need to consume ETH, DeFi activity still brings fees, and L2 still has to settle to the mainnet, so ETH still benefits from on-chain prosperity.
Hu Yilin’s rebuttal is: fees certainly have value, but fees are not a monetary standard.
He continues the gas metaphor commonly used in the Ethereum community, but pushes it in the opposite direction. “Gas prices will not be infinite, because once gas prices become expensive enough, people will have a stronger incentive to look for alternative energy,” he says. What’s more, replacing Ethereum is much easier than replacing gas infrastructure. Turning cars from fuel to electric requires new industrial chains and product design; but for a DeFi protocol to migrate from Ethereum to a compatible public chain, the technical threshold is much lower.
In his view, if Ethereum relies only on fee income, it will run into the valuation ceiling of an infrastructure service provider. Exchanges, clearinghouses, and payment networks can all be important, but their revenue scale is not equal to the monetary premium of a base asset. Hu Yilin asks in return: how much fee income does the Nasdaq exchange make in a year? Does the combined net income of global securities exchanges exceed the revenue of a single Apple?
However, he does not think that all public blockchains must shoulder the same revolutionary mission. Public chains like Solana never aimed that high to begin with; their positioning is closer to “being a strong competitor at the company level,” for example, becoming a high-performance alternative to Ethereum. Hu Yilin says that if a project “was originally positioned as selling fuel, then of course it can accept that positioning.” For such chains, fees, performance, ecosystem, developer experience, and application migration capability are the core metrics on which they can compete.
The problem is that not all crypto assets can be content with “selling fuel.” Hu Yilin distinguishes three categories of projects: first is Bitcoin, which from the moment of its birth was aimed at a monetary revolution; second is Ethereum, which wants to be a “world computer” and become an innovation at the level of human civilization; third is many emerging small coins, which lack the backing of traditional capital and must rely on grand narratives to attract attention and trust.
Therefore, the real disagreement is not whether all coins should talk about revolution, but this: any project that seeks a higher ceiling cannot avoid revolutionary narrative. You can just be a block-space service provider, you can just be a high-performance chain, you can just be a financial application platform, but if you claim that you want to change the world, reorganize civilization’s infrastructure, and become the next-generation currency or the next-generation internet, then you cannot downgrade your own native coin narrative into nothing more than fee fuel.
The Copernican Moment of the Crypto Revolution: the Earth Can Move
In the history of astronomy, the key to the Copernican Revolution was not merely that the computational model was simpler, but that people accepted a fact that ran against intuition: the Earth can move, and human everyday life does not thereby collapse.
Hu Yilin believes that blockchain and Bitcoin’s monetary revolution have a similar threshold of thought. The true Copernican moment is not that stablecoins make cross-border transfers cheaper, nor that banks learn to settle on-chain, but that market participants begin to realize: economic life may not need a fixed central bank as the center of the monetary order.
“The key is to liberate people’s minds: the Earth can move, and my down-to-earth life does not depend on the Earth standing still,” Hu Yilin says. Applied to the money question, the core idea is this: “Our lives, normal market transactions, do not depend on a fixed central bank; the market does not need the central bank to act at every moment in order to maintain stability. What money is, and what its value should be, are all decided spontaneously by the market, decided by every decentralized, concrete transaction; no specific institution needs to issue that decree.”
This is also the fundamental reason he insists on Bitcoin as the base unit and criticizes stablecoin-based systems. Stablecoins can improve efficiency, can serve as transitional tools, and can act as bridges between the real world and the on-chain world. But if the on-chain world is still ultimately priced in dollars, underpinned by U.S. Treasury bonds, and measured in the final instance by central-bank money, then the so-called “blockchain revolution” is merely an add-on to the dollar system.
The appearance of Open USD has precisely made this debate even clearer. It may be an important step toward the commercialization, institutionalization, and scaling-up of stablecoins; but from the perspective of the original ideals of cryptocurrency, it may also mark a successful incorporation of blockchain technology by the old system.
Hu Yilin does not deny the historical significance of stablecoins. But historical significance does not mean the revolution is complete. The Tychonic system was once popular precisely because it could accommodate new technology and old authority; but what truly changed the picture of the world was still the new paradigm that set the Earth in motion.
The same is true for the crypto world: if the dollar never moves, and the Federal Reserve is forever at the center, then no matter how open or efficient stablecoins become, they are still only precision instruments of the old universe. The true revolution will have to wait until the market believes that the monetary order does not have to revolve around that center.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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