Woofun AI reports that the launch of Open USD by a coalition of over 140 institutions signals a strategic pivot where stablecoins function not as crypto revolutionaries but as royalist reformers designed to reinforce the hegemony of the US dollar and the Federal Reserve. Scholar Hu Yilin posits that while this new infrastructure inherits the technical efficiency of blockchain, it fundamentally preserves the central position of the existing fiat order, thereby shifting the core question of the crypto revolution to whether market life must rely on a central bank as the anchor of monetary order. The emergence of this alliance moves the competitive landscape from isolated crypto startups to a comprehensive battle for infrastructure involving traditional finance, payment networks, technology platforms, and public chain ecosystems.

On June 30, Open Standard officially announced the launch of Open USD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin engineered specifically to facilitate global capital flows through a redesigned governance and economic model. The official design specifications mandate that enterprises can mint and redeem the asset at zero cost, while reserve earnings are distributed to partners after the deduction of a minimal management fee, all under the operation of the independent entity Open Standard with a board composed of participating partners. The roster of participants represents a convergence of the payments, banking, technology, and crypto sectors, explicitly including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, OCBC, Google, Shopify, Coinbase, Solana, Base, Ripple, MetaMask, and Aave. This broad coalition signifies a departure from single-entity issuance toward a multi-stakeholder infrastructure project.

Market reactions to the announcement were immediate and varied, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Open USD plans to deploy on networks such as Base and Solana later this year, having already secured commitments from approximately 140 companies. Despite this expansion, the report noted that USDT and USDC remain the dominant players with a combined market value of about $260 billion, yet Barron's highlighted that the announcement placed downward pressure on the stock prices of related entities like Circle and Coinbase. The new alliance directly threatens the existing business model of USDC by introducing a competitor that offers a more favorable distribution of reserve earnings and a governance structure that includes the very institutions USDC previously sought to disrupt. On the surface, this appears to be an upgrade in industry competition characterized by increased participation, expanded channel connectivity, and a reimagined mechanism for reserve earnings distribution.

However, the deeper driver identified by Hu Yilin is not the potential market share shift from USDC or USDT, but the revelation of the historical position of stablecoins themselves within the broader financial architecture. Stablecoins do not truly challenge the dollar standard; instead, they merely allow the dollar standard to operate with greater efficiency and reach. Hu Yilin supports the development of stablecoins because they exert direct pressure on fiat currency and the banking system, forcing changes in the real political and economic structure, yet he emphasizes that supporting them as a tool does not equate to acknowledging them as the completed form of the crypto revolution. He previously compared stablecoins to the Tycho system in the Copernican revolution, noting that the Tycho system absorbed many technical advantages of new astronomy and could explain more phenomena, making it easier for traditional authorities to accept during the revolution, but it rejected the most core point by preventing the Earth from moving.

Stablecoins are structurally similar to the Tycho system in that they inherit the clearing efficiency, programmability, global liquidity, and cross-border payment advantages of blockchain, yet they refuse to let the dollar leave its central position. When discussing Open USD, Hu Yilin further distinguishes between 'moderates' and 'royalists,' stating that someone like Michael Saylor counts as a 'moderate' because he wants to be compatible with the old system while holding onto the core revolutionary point of the 'Bitcoin standard.' The Saylor approach accepts publicly listed companies, accounting standards, debt financing, capital markets, and regulatory frameworks, but it still views Bitcoin as a new standard asset, compromising with the old system without abandoning the revolutionary core that the emperor can be replaced. Stablecoins are different in that they resemble reformists within the old system who believe the emperor, defined as the dollar and the Federal Reserve, is good, but the execution system below is bloated and inefficient.

In this metaphor, the 'Western Factory' of stablecoins aims to improve the execution system where the 'Eastern Factory' of traditional banking allegedly performed poorly, without challenging the highest authority. This metaphor sharply points out the inherent limitations of stablecoins: what they oppose is not the dollar center, but the old payment systems, banking clearing networks, cross-border transfer systems, and the inefficiency of financial intermediaries. What they want to replace is the grassroots bureaucracy, not the highest authority. Therefore, when the crypto revolution can only touch banks, payment companies, SWIFT, Visa, Alipay, and other 'execution systems,' stablecoins appear to align directionally with more radical cryptocurrency routes because they both oppose the expensive, slow, and opaque old financial system. But once the issue touches the dollar, US debt, the Federal Reserve, and the fiat currency standard, the differences between the two become apparent, as Hu Yilin notes that stablecoins have been preventing the revolution from going deeper from the very beginning.

The uniqueness of Open USD lies in the fact that it is not a new coin launched by a single crypto startup team, but rather a coalition project involving payment companies, banks, technology platforms, asset management institutions, and public chain ecosystems. Open Standard officially emphasizes that it aims to give enterprises a higher level of participation in stablecoin reserve earnings, governance, and large-scale usage, marking a symbolic shift where the old system is no longer just a target for transformation but has directly become the initiator and governor of stablecoin infrastructure. Hu Yilin believes this poses an irony for native stablecoin companies like Circle: if the mission of stablecoins is to serve the dollar system, be 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 networks, the original stablecoin entrepreneurs will find it difficult to claim they possess an irreplaceable revolutionary legitimacy.

He frames this issue as a series of probing questions regarding who exactly stablecoins are supposed to revolutionize, asking if the target is SWIFT, interbank settlements, Visa, or Alipay, and what happens if these entities themselves start using, issuing, or participating in stablecoin networks. In his view, if the goal of stablecoins is merely to get the old system to adopt blockchain payment technology, then when the old system adopts stablecoins, the stablecoin movement can declare success and even 'retire with merit.' But if these native stablecoin companies are still unwilling to be co-opted, they must redefine their fundamental differences from the old system by returning to the path of decentralization, abandoning compromise, and continuing the revolution. The 'drawing of boundaries' here does not necessarily have to take only one form, as Hu Yilin does not require all projects to follow the Bitcoin route, but insists they must retain some truly 'disobedient' aspect such as a currency standard, decentralized governance, anti-censorship, self-custody, non-freezable assets, open protocols, and exit rights.

This statement highlights the awkwardness of the stablecoin narrative: when a project builds all its selling points on compliance, efficiency, low cost, institutional friendliness, and compatibility with old finance, it is likely not to disrupt the old system but to be absorbed by the old system as a new department. Hu Yilin agrees with a more macro judgment that the more successful dollar stablecoins are, it does not necessarily mean that cryptocurrencies are more successful; rather, it may indicate that the dollar system is more successful. If global cross-border e-commerce, remittances, on-chain transactions, RWA, DeFi, and corporate settlements increasingly use dollar stablecoins, then what may be weakened are local banking systems, traditional cross-border payment networks, and some capital controls, but what remains strengthened are dollar pricing, US debt reserves, and the US regulatory framework.

Open USD is a concentrated embodiment of this trend, using blockchain as a new track for capital flow while the measure of value remains the dollar, the underlying earnings still come from reserve assets, and the governance structure is jointly participated in by corporate alliances and financial institutions. It is not an anti-dollar financial revolution but more like a blockchain upgrade package for dollar hegemony. This also explains why Hu Yilin believes that stablecoins are becoming the long-term adversaries of most native cryptocurrencies, as the issue is not just that stablecoins are taking away the function of transaction mediums, but that they may reshape the foundational structure of the on-chain world. If the pricing unit of on-chain finance is dollar stablecoins, the collateral assets are US debt and RWA, the source of earnings is traditional financial assets, and the users' value anchoring is also in dollars, then the more prosperous on-chain activities do not necessarily mean that ETH, SOL, or other native chain currencies will have monetary premiums.

Woofun AI data shows, The on-chain world can thrive, but wealth is deposited in off-chain dollar assets, stablecoin issuers, and traditional financial earnings structures, breaking the logic that 'the more prosperous the on-chain, the more the native currency appreciates' and turning it into 'the more prosperous the on-chain, the richer the off-chain.' The issue of stablecoins has also led Hu Yilin to re-criticize Ethereum's 'oil' narrative, where many supporters believe that even if USDT, USDC, or Open USD are primarily used on-chain, transactions still require consuming ETH, DeFi activities will still generate transaction fees, and L2 still needs to settle to the mainnet, so ETH will still benefit from the prosperity of the on-chain. Hu Yilin's rebuttal is that transaction fees certainly have value, but transaction fees are not the currency standard, and gas prices will not be infinite because when gas prices become too expensive, people will have a stronger motivation to seek alternative energy sources.

Moreover, replacing Ethereum is much easier than replacing gasoline infrastructure, as changing cars from fuel to electric requires a new industrial chain and product design, but migrating a DeFi protocol from Ethereum to a compatible public chain has a much lower technical threshold. In his view, if Ethereum relies solely on transaction fee income, it will encounter a valuation ceiling as an infrastructure service provider, because exchanges, clearinghouses, and payment networks can be important, but their revenue scale does not equate to the monetary premium of standard assets. Hu Yilin asks how much the Nasdaq exchange earns in transaction fees in a year and whether the net revenues of global securities exchanges add up to more than that of a single Apple company.

However, he does not believe that all public chains must bear the same revolutionary mission, noting that public chains like Solana originally do not have such grand ambitions and their positioning is closer to 'being a strong competitor at the company level,' such as becoming a high-performance alternative to Ethereum.

If a project is originally positioned to sell fuel, then it can certainly accept that positioning, where transaction fees, performance, ecosystem, developer experience, and application migration capability are their core competitive indicators. The problem is that not all crypto assets can be satisfied with 'selling fuel,' as Hu Yilin distinguishes three types of projects: the first is Bitcoin, which has aimed for a monetary revolution since its inception; the second is Ethereum, which wants to be a 'world computer,' aiming to become a civilization-level innovation; the third is many emerging small coins, which do not have traditional capital backing and must rely on grand narratives to attract attention and trust. Therefore, the real divergence is not whether all coins should talk about revolution, but rather that any project that seeks a higher ceiling cannot avoid the revolutionary narrative, and if you claim you want to change the world, restructure civilization infrastructure, or become the next generation of currency or the next generation of the internet, then you cannot reduce your native currency narrative to transaction fee fuel.

In the history of astronomy, the key to the Copernican revolution is not just that the computational model is simpler, but that people accepted an intuitive fact: the Earth can move, and daily life does not collapse as a result. Hu Yilin believes that the monetary revolution of blockchain and Bitcoin also has a similar ideological threshold, where the true Copernican moment is not that stablecoins make cross-border transfers cheaper, nor that banks learn to use on-chain settlements, but that market participants begin to realize that economic life does not necessarily need a fixed central bank as the center of monetary order. The key is that people liberate their thoughts to understand that the Earth can move, and their grounded life does not depend on the Earth being still, corresponding to the monetary concept that normal market transactions do not depend on a fixed central bank or constant intervention to maintain stability.

What constitutes money and how much that money is worth are all determined spontaneously by the market, by each specific decentralized transaction, without needing a specific institution to decree this. This is also the fundamental reason he insists on a Bitcoin standard and criticizes a stablecoin standard, as stablecoins can improve efficiency, serve as transitional tools, and act as a bridge between the real world and the on-chain world, but if the on-chain world ultimately still values in dollars, is based on US debt as underlying assets, and uses central bank currency as the final measure of value, then the so-called 'blockchain revolution' is merely an add-on to the dollar system. The emergence of Open USD has made this debate clearer, as it may be an important step toward the commercialization, institutionalization, and scaling of stablecoins, but from the perspective of the original ideals of cryptocurrencies, it may also mark a successful co-option of blockchain technology by the old system.

Hu Yilin does not deny the historical significance of stablecoins, but historical significance does not equate to the completion of a revolution, as the Tycho system was once popular precisely because it could accommodate new technologies and old authorities, but what truly changes the world's landscape is still the new paradigm that allows the Earth to move. For the crypto world, the question is the same: if the dollar never moves, and the Federal Reserve is always at the center, then no matter how open and efficient stablecoins are, they are merely sophisticated instruments of the old universe. The true revolution will wait until the market believes that the monetary order can rotate without revolving around that center, marking a definitive shift from royalist reform to a decentralized monetary order.