M^0, a decentralized infrastructure layer for the issuance of crypto dollar assets, announced a Series A fundraising totaling $35 million in connection with the deployment of the M^0 core protocol and on-chain governance mechanism on Ethereum Mainnet. The Series A funding round was led by Bain Capital Crypto (Bain Capital’s crypto investment platform).
Headed by a team of MakerDAO and Circle veterans among others, the financial infrastructure design built by M^0 utilizes an institutional-grade approach to DeFi, empowering any institution to mint a decentralized, interoperable, and fungible crypto dollar.
Along with Bain Capital Crypto, the Series A round and launch phase featured 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.
At the CORE of M^0 is an open federation mode that enables for stablecoin issuance based on high-quality reserve assets such as U.S treasuries. And the platform enables multiple entities to mint a single and fungible crypto dollar called M. Minter entities bring their own standardized and once permissioned by governance, connect to M^0’s decentralized protocol to mint M. Independent entities known as Validators can connect to standard M^0 off-chain software in order to continuously verify the presence of collateral and adherence to standards.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
- Stefan Cohen, Partner at Bain Capital Crypto
“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.”
- Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera Capital
“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.”
“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.”
- Luca Prosperi, President of the M^0 Foundation Council
“The stablecoin sector continues to see innovation with a wave of tokenized-treasury and other products entering the market. But one area where there’s been a lack of solutions is multi-issuance and interoperability, or singleness of money. M^0 is poised to power a new wave of products built on their infrastructure and we’re proud to be joining this round.”
- Will Nuelle, General Partner at Galaxy Ventures
