Settlement

Open USD, a dollar stablecoin backed by a 140-plus company consortium including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard and Coinbase, and Qivalis, a 37-bank euro stablecoin project, are best read not as new tokens but as competing bids to own the architecture of digital settlement. Both share reserve economics and governance more widely than the single-issuer model, and both are control projects dressed in the language of openness. Against a concentrated $302bn market (USDT 61 per cent, USDC 24.2 per cent, HHI 4,324), the next contest will be decided by governance, reserves, redemption, liquidity and access, not market cap. The better outcome is disciplined competition, not a new consortium gate or a state-controlled CBDC.