Hassan Maishera
On Tuesday, Aptos Labs announced via X that it has joined a coalition of more than 140 companies supporting the launch of Open USD, a new stablecoin designed to lower costs and improve access for businesses using blockchain-based payments.
Developed by Open Standard, Open USD aims to address several long-standing challenges associated with existing stablecoins by introducing a more open, enterprise-focused model for digital payments.
The initiative has attracted support from a broad mix of traditional financial institutions, payment providers, technology companies, and blockchain firms, including Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, BlackRock, Ripple, and Solana.
Open USD is built around three primary design objectives intended to make the stablecoin more attractive to businesses.
Free Minting and Redemption
Businesses will be able to mint and redeem Open USD without paying fees, regardless of transaction size or volume.
The absence of artificial volume limits is designed to support enterprise-scale payment operations.
Revenue Sharing for Partners
Unlike many existing stablecoins, Open USD allows participating organizations to receive the earnings generated from the stablecoin's underlying reserve assets.
Partners will receive these proceeds after a small management fee is deducted to cover operating expenses.
Community-Based Governance
Rather than being controlled by a single issuer, Open USD will be governed collectively through Open Standard, an independent organization whose board is composed of participating partners.
This governance structure is intended to ensure that strategic decisions reflect the interests of the broader ecosystem instead of one controlling entity.
Aptos is a scalable layer-1 blockchain based on the Move programming language. APT is the project's native token.
Aptos is a Layer 1 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that employs a novel smart contract programming language called Move, a Rust-based programming language that was independently developed by Meta (formerly Facebook)’s Diem blockchain engineers.
Aptos’s vision is a blockchain that brings mainstream adoption to web3 and empowers an ecosystem of DApps to solve real-world user problems.
The PoS blockchain can achieve a theoretical transaction throughput of over 150,000 transactions per second (TPS) through parallel execution.
In March 2022, Aptos raised $200 million in a seed round led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Other crypto heavyweights like Tiger Global and Multicoin Capital took part in the funding round.
Fast forward to July, the startup raised another $200 million in a Series A round with participation from Dragonfly, Apollo Global, Franklin Templeton, Animoca, Jump Crypto, and others.
APT is up 3.5%, trading at $0.5904 per coin. For a start, the Aptos team claims that its network can process over 150,000 TPS. By comparison, Ethereum’s mainnet TPS is around 12 to 15.
This high transaction throughput is enabled by a parallel execution engine (Block-STM)—a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) PoS consensus mechanism. For context, most blockchains execute transactions sequentially, which means that a single failed transaction or high network demand could hold up the entire chain.
