Tech companies are currently shifting away from centralized, proprietary tokens. Instead, they are collaborating through industry consortiums. The most notable project for global money movement is Open USD (OUSD), a new stablecoin backed by over 140 companies, including Google, Samsung, Visa, Stripe, and DoorDash.

Tech and fintech companies are bypassing legacy issuers like Tether and Circle to build more collaborative, cost-effective infrastructure:

1. Open USD (OUSD)

• What it is: Backed by an independent venture called Open Standard, OUSD is an open-standard, dollar-pegged stablecoin designed specifically for internet commerce. The project is currently unlaunched, with a phased rollout scheduled for later in 2026 across major blockchain networks, including Solana, Stellar, Base, and Polygon.

• Key Tech Backers: Google, Samsung, IBM, and Shopify.

  The Goal: To allow businesses to mint and redeem stablecoins at zero cost, returning reserve interest earnings directly to corporate partners.

  Target Use Cases: OUSD is designed as open infrastructure for both traditional finance and decentralized digital environments, focusing on three core pillars:

   

  1. Next-Gen Payments: Allowing merchants, platforms, and financial institutions to accept and settle digital dollar payments instantly without the high fees associated with legacy rails.

1. 1. Corporate Spend & Issuance: Enabling companies to manage spend with real-time visibility and issue crypto-funded cards while keeping treasuries seamlessly on-chain.

   2. Agentic Commerce: Providing a fast, programmatic payment rail that autonomous software agents can use to initiate and settle transactions instantly 24/7.

2. PYUSD (PayPal USD)

• What it is: A fiat-collateralized stablecoin issued by PayPal, fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits and U.S. Treasuries.

• The Goal: To natively bridge Web3 rails with mainstream B2C/B2B commerce, ensuring users have familiar payment options while taking advantage of on-chain stability.

3. Global Dollar (USDG)

• What it is: A regulated, multi-chain stablecoin launched by the Global Dollar Network, focusing heavily on compliance and enterprise payment settlement.

• Key Tech Backers: Supported by fintechs and platforms like Mastercard, Robinhood, Paxos, Galaxy Digital, and Kraken.

• Target use cases for USDG include:

• • 1. Cross-Border Payments & Remittances: USDG facilitates fast, affordable international transfers. Powered by GDN partners like OKX and Kraken, it allows users to move funds globally in minutes, drastically reducing traditional wire delays and high banking fees.

    2. Enterprise & Institutional Treasury: Institutions leverage USDG for peer-to-peer settlements and secure portfolio management. Its compliant structure (under MAS in Singapore and MiCA in the EU) provides enterprises a trusted digital asset to optimize global cash flow.

    3. DeFi & Smart Contracts: As a multi-chain ERC-20 token, USDG acts as collateral in lending, borrowing, and yield-farming across decentralized platforms (e.g., Kamino, JupLend). It enables developers to build secure, interoperable financial products.

    4. E-Commerce & Merchant Acceptance: Merchants and payment processors use USDG to accept secure, low-cost digital payments. By bypassing traditional credit card networks, businesses can avoid high interchange fees while avoiding crypto volatility.

4. Direct Corporate Explorations

Outside of consortium projects, Big Tech firms are actively exploring how to integrate digital dollars into their cloud, hardware, and social platforms. Companies including Apple and X have been steadily building out cryptocurrency and crypto-friendly payment capabilities to keep pace with the evolving regulatory environment.

5. Q-day, post-quantum preparations

Most tech and financial companies are not building entirely new post-quantum stablecoins from scratch. Instead, they are retrofitting existing major stablecoins with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to protect their central treasury keys from future "Q-Day" (the day quantum computers can break legacy encryption).

Tech and finance leaders are implementing these quantum-safe frameworks across several major projects:

• A) QSSN (Quantum Stablecoin Settlement Network): Built by BTQTechnologies, this layer acts as a "drop-in" security shield. It adds a secondary, quantum-resistant signature using NIST-approved algorithms like Falcon 512 to secure the privileged functions (such as minting and burning tokens) of the world's biggest stablecoins, including Tether (USDT), Circle (USDC), and JPMorgan's JPMD.

  The QSSN framework helps traditional finance (TradFi) and digital assets prepare for "Q-Day"—the point when quantum computers will be able to break legacy cryptography (such as RSA or ECC). Platforms utilizing this framework are positioning themselves to meet upcoming U.S. federal and international regulatory mandates requiring quantum-resistant financial infrastructure.

   

  B) Bank-Led Proof-of-Concepts: Financial institutions (like major banks in South Korea) are using the QSSN framework to issue regional KRW stablecoins secured by hardware-based PQC.

   

  C) Hedera (HBAR) Network: Tech heavyweights backing Hedera (such as Google and IBM) are actively migrating their network signing and user account keys to PQC standards. Hedera (HBAR) is highly proactive in its approach to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). While the network is actively planning its phased migration to quantum-proof standards, its foundational hashes and encryption are already post-quantum secure for the first stage of the post-quantum era, ensuring historical data remains safe from future quantum attacks.

Current Quantum Defenses:

• 1. Hashing Standards: Hedera utilizes 384-bit hashes (like SHA-384). Most blockchains use 256-bit hashes, which are theoretically vulnerable to quantum computers. The 384-bit standard is already considered post-quantum secure on the first stage of the post-quantum era, by industry and government experts.

  2. Encryption: The network employs AES-256 for secure data-at-rest encryption, which remains highly resistant to quantum threats on the first stage of the post-quantum era.

  3. Historical Integrity: Because Hedera anchors its state to these robust 384-bit hashes, future quantum computers cannot alter or falsify the historical ordering of the hashgraph.

   

  Phased Migration & Roadmap

  1. Signature Upgrades: While hashes are secure, digital signatures (such as the commonly used Ed25519) are susceptible to being broken by quantum computing algorithms.

  2. Falcon Signatures: Hedera plans to adopt state-of-the-art quantum-resistant algorithms (such as the NIST Falcon standard).

  3. Dual-Signing: The migration strategy features a deliberate rollout—employing both old and new signatures simultaneously (dual-signing) to verify events. Once standards are finalized, users will be able to seamlessly upgrade their existing account keys without requiring new accounts or seed phrases.

   

  Ecosystem Initiatives

• QAIT & Sealcoin: Hedera’s ecosystem partners, such as SEALSQ and The Hashgraph Group, have launched platforms like QAIT (Quantum Day Security Assessment) to integrate post-quantum tech directly into physical chips and machine-to-machine economies.

   

  D) Arc Network: This system is being designed from the ground up with a native post-quantum signature scheme, offering a forward-compatible path to create quantum-resistant wallets and stablecoin assets without relying on older, vulnerable elliptic-curve signatures. Arc, the purpose-built blockchain developed by Circle, achieves post-quantum readiness by baking quantum-resistant design into its architecture from day one. Rather than relying on classical elliptic-curve signatures that require retroactive patches, Arc supports quantum-resistant wallet signatures at mainnet launch, proactive asset protection, and phased upgrades to off-chain infrastructure. Circle outlines a holistic Circle’s Post-Quantum Security Whitepaper (see [1]) covering both on-chain and off-chain system operations:

• Quantum-Resistant Wallet Signatures: Arc supports post-quantum signature schemes at launch so users can proactively secure assets against future quantum threats without needing later migrations.

• Phased Validator Upgrades: Validator signatures are scheduled for hardening in a later phase to preserve network throughput and sub-second finality.

• Off-chain Infrastructure: Security measures extend to operational systems, such as upgrading node-to-node communications to TLS 1.3 using the X25519MLKEM768 hybrid key agreement, cloud environments, and encrypted data flows.

• Long-Term Protection: As detailed in Circle's Post-Quantum Security Roadmap, see [1], these measures focus on protecting stablecoins, Real-World Assets (RWAs), and institutional configurations against long-term vulnerabilities.

6. Impact on the global banking system, USD, crypto, gold

Open USD (OUSD) and similar stablecoins impact the US dollar and traditional banking by creating a direct, borderless, 24/7 payment rail. They extend the global dominance of the US dollar by increasing its international use, but they simultaneously threaten banks’ deposit bases and fee revenues, forcing traditional finance to adapt.

Impact on the US Dollar

• Strengthened Global Reserve Status: Because nearly all stablecoins are pegged to the USD, they lower the barrier for global access to the dollar economy. They are frequently used in emerging markets as a hedge against local inflation. This cements the USD's position as the primary global currency.

• Increased Demand for US Debt: To back their tokens 1-to-1, stablecoin issuers are massive buyers of short-term US Treasury securities and cash equivalents. This structural demand helps keep borrowing costs low for the US government.

• Agentic and Programmatic Commerce: Open stablecoins provide underlying infrastructure for automated, programmable software agents to settle commercial and international transactions in USD instantly, without relying on legacy correspondent banking delays.

Impact on the Banking System

• Disintermediation and Funding Costs: When capital moves out of traditional bank accounts and into stablecoins, banks lose their cheapest and most stable sources of funding. This drives up the cost of funds for traditional banks and can tighten lending capacity.

• Loss of Payment and Fee Revenues: Because stablecoins bypass traditional wire, card, and correspondent network intermediaries, banks lose out on lucrative payment, clearing, and cross-border exchange fee revenue.

• Regulatory Risks: Shifting portions of the dollar supply into private digital networks outside traditional oversight complicates central bank monetary policy. It also brings risks of transmission—where a loss of confidence in a stablecoin's reserves can trigger rapid selling in the Treasury market.

Open standard stablecoins (like the Visa and Stripe-backed Open USD coalition) are designed as shared infrastructure rather than proprietary networks. This approach has forced legacy institutions—including commercial banks, card networks, and tech giants—to defensively and proactively adapt. Rather than being pushed out, many banks and financial institutions are joining these networks to retain their corporate clients, secure custodial operations, and participate in reserve revenue sharing.

In emerging markets suffering from high local inflation, citizens frequently adopt USD stablecoins to preserve their purchasing power. This spreads U.S. monetary policy globally, helping stabilize the dollar but potentially weakening the sovereignty of foreign central banks.

When stablecoins act as widely accepted parallel mediums of exchange to traditional bank balances, they can reduce the Greenback's purchasing power by increasing overall liquidity and the velocity of money.

If stablecoin holders reallocate capital away from government debt (toward crypto), it can raise real interest rates. If issuers strictly park these funds in safe assets, it absorbs global safe assets and lowers borrowing costs.

Open USD stablecoins—especially new decentralized and collaborative models backed by enterprise and traditional finance networks—profoundly impact the global economic system. By lowering cross-border remittance costs, they accelerate digital dollarization but pose systemic risks, including bank deposit flight, potential liquidity shortages, and the erosion of emerging-market monetary sovereignty.

Open USD stablecoins may negatively impact financial systems even of some developed countries, for example, Canada.

The rise of Open USD and broader USD-pegged stablecoins impacts the Canadian dollar by threatening Canada's monetary sovereignty and domestic payment infrastructure. If Canadians and businesses widely adopt US dollar stablecoins for everyday transactions, the demand for Canadian dollar-denominated payment systems will decline, leaving the domestic economy more dependent on U.S. policy decisions.

The integration of Open USD and foreign stablecoins into the Canadian financial ecosystem poses distinct challenges and structural changes:

• Erosion of Monetary Sovereignty: As the U.S. dollar dominates the global stablecoin market, widespread use of USD-backed stablecoins in Canada weakens the central role of the Canadian dollar in daily commerce and financial settlements.

• Shift in Payment Rails: Relying on foreign-owned stablecoin issuers and networks means that Canada’s core financial plumbing (such as transaction data security and settlement rules) is controlled externally, reducing domestic oversight.

• Regulatory Challenges: The Canadian Stablecoin Framework prohibits the payment of direct or indirect yield to stablecoin holders. This regulatory hurdle puts Canada at a disadvantage when trying to replicate the incentive and yield models used by Open USD and other U.S.-based stablecoin networks.

• Impact on Commercial Banking: Increased usage of global stablecoins could lead to a domestic outflow of bank deposits as users divert traditional savings into stablecoin wallets.

Impact on cryptos

Open USD (OUSD)—a partner-led stablecoin backed by over 140 companies including Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, and BlackRock—will impact cryptos by increasing institutional liquidity, intensifying Decentralized Finance (DeFi) yield wars, and potentially diluting the market share of older cryptos.

Impact on gold

While stablecoins affect the daily liquidity and short-term expression of gold's value in fiat terms, they do not solve systemic fiat debasement. The broader macroeconomic drivers that push gold upward—such as fiscal deficits, geopolitical risks, and central bank diversification—remain completely intact.

Reference:

1. https://6778953.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6778953/PDFs/quantum_paper.pdf