Quoting from the USD homepage:

"Well-known file formats for interchange in the VFX industry like OBJ, FBX, and Alembic primarily deal with interchanging flat/cached geometry, with no facility for assembling assets or editing the data directly. USD does serve the role of an “interchange file format,” more comprehensively than previous public efforts, because it already interchanges not only geometry, but also shading/materials, lights, rendering, linear-blend skinning and blend-shape animation, rigid body physics, and is extensible along numerous axes."