M^0, which is described ss a “decentralized” infrastructure layer for the issuance of cryptodollar assets, announced a Series A fundraise totaling $35 million, in conjunction with the deployment of the M^0 core protocol and on-chain governance mechanism on Ethereum Mainnet.
The Series A investment round is led “by Bain Capital Crypto, Bain Capital’s crypto investment platform.”
Led by a team of, among others, MakerDAO and Circle veterans, the financial infrastructure design built by M^0 employs “an institutional-grade approach to DeFi, empowering any institution to mint a decentralized, interoperable, and fungible cryptodollar.”
In addition to Bain Capital Crypto, the Series A round and launch phase “drew support from existing investors as well as strategic partners including Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, GSR, Caladan and SCB 10X. M^0 previously raised $22.5 million in seed funding led by Pantera Capital in early 2023.”
Stefan Cohen, Partner at Bain Capital Crypto said:
“Stablecoins are the largest and fastest growing asset for settlement on public blockchains today. We expect this market to continue to grow quickly to trillions of dollars over the next decade. M^0 is taking a unique approach, with lessons from MakerDAO to form a new decentralized stablecoin collateralized exclusively by short-term treasuries. We are impressed with the M^0 team’s mix of stablecoin, DeFi and traditional finance expertise, and we’re excited to support them in this next phase of growth.”
Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera Capital said:
“Decentralized Finance continues to face challenges when it comes to attracting and onboarding institutional liquidity. The M^0 infrastructure can power a new global network of high-quality institutions who want to leverage their assets to mint a fungible stablecoin, thus minimizing liquidity fragmentation. What Visa, Mastercard and American Express have done for payments, M^0 wants to do to value distribution.”
At the heart of M^0 is an innovative, open federation mode, that “allows for stablecoin issuance based on high quality reserve assets such as U.S treasuries.”
The platform allows multiple entities “to mint a single, fungible cryptodollar called M. Minter entities bring their own standardized, high-quality collateral, and once permissioned by governance, connect to M^0’s decentralized protocol to mint M. Independent entities called Validators can connect to standard M^0 offchain software in order to continuously verify the presence of collateral and adherence to standards.”
Luca Prosperi, President of the M^0 Foundation Council said:
“While the stablecoin sector has grown to over $160 billion in size, it still mostly comprises what we consider to be v1 solutions, more often than not additional layers on top of antiquated and redundant financial infrastructure. M^0 aims to set new standards in terms of issuance, collateral storage, governance, and interoperability. The vision is to move this technology forward as the next generation backend for fintech frontends.”
Prosperi added:
“We are transitioning from an outdated monetary infrastructure dominated by large, centralized parties, to a much more modern, federated framework for cryptodollar issuance. We reject a future cluttered with non-interoperable and riskier forms of money. This Series A funding, backed by some of the very best partners in the industry, will drive the entities within the emerging M^0 ecosystem to build the middleware for a new global federation of reputable money issuers and distributors.”
