USDC (USDC)

BREAKING: $CRCL is down 16.30% today after Mastercard, Stripe, BNY, and other major payments firms unveiled a rival stablecoin, Open USD.

The new venture is built as shared, neutral infrastructure rather than a single company's product.

It directly threatens Circle's USDC and Tether's USDT, which together dominate nearly all stablecoin volume today.

Unlike Circle, the new venture splits reserve yield earnings among all its partners instead of keeping it for one issuer.

Klarna, Mastercard, and Stripe were already active in stablecoins before this, Klarna launched its own in November, Mastercard acquired stablecoin infrastructure startup BVNK earlier this year, and Stripe has long embraced the technology.

This adds to pressure already building on Circle. Insiders have sold roughly $225 million more than they've bought over the past 12 months, and the Fed proposed new rules on June 18 requiring stablecoin issuers to run bank style customer identification programs.

$CRCL is down 13% today, trading at $66 per share after hitting an all-time high of $263.

The reason isn't just market sentiment.

USDC has a $73B market cap, while Tether's USDT is much bigger at $145B.

Now Open USD is putting more pressure on Circle by charging zero minting fees and sharing reserve income with over 140 partners.

Circle makes most of its money from the interest earned on USDC reserves, and Coinbase already takes about 50% of that revenue.

This isn't a new problem.

The market is simply starting to price in lower profits for Circle.

$USDC issuer Circle's stock after this news: https://t.co/OWlJTZEFbO