The fast-growing stablecoin issuer is the latest to use the M^0 infrastructure to launch the token

M^0, a stablecoin infrastructure provider, has entered into a second integration agreement, this time with the fast-growing, fiat-backed stablecoin issuer Usual. This marks the latest diversification of Hashnote-backed Common Reserves, a tokenized money market fund previously built by the founders of DRW.

Launched four months ago, the custom has identified a fast track to growth. On Wednesday, it surpassed $1 billion in market capitalization, becoming the seventh-largest stablecoin. M^0 (pronounced M Zero) has also seen impressive growth since its launch earlier this year.

“There are several extensions in the pipeline,” Gregory Di Prisco, the founder of M^0, said in an interview with “Block” newspaper. “Putting these deals together has two parts: there’s a technical side to the equation and a business side. From a technical point of view, it is very fast. Now we can put these together in a couple of weeks and eventually get it down to minutes.”

Di Prisco noted that the middleware platform, which allows users to create customizable “extensions” built using the US Treasury-backed M stablecoin platform, could eventually become “self-service.”

“Every time we add a piece of customization, it becomes stock,” Di Prisco said. “So the compatibility features that we added for Normal, now they’ve been tested and we can recommend them to everyone.” These features include the ability to blacklist addresses and open UsualM tokens to M, Di Prisco noted.

“Integrating $M as the foundation for UsualM is a crucial step in advancing our vision for stablecoins,” Usual CEO Pierre Person said in a statement. “With UsualM, we’re not just introducing another stablecoin, we’re redefining what digital dollars can mean and impact.”

Earlier this month, the Cosmos-based Noble blockchain became the first to launch a dollar token. USDNUsing M^0’s technical stack.

“Precious Dollar is in Space. As usual, Ethereum is there. We’re going to Solana soon,” said Di Prisco. “We’re working with Wormhole to be multi-chain, and I can’t say there’s a more important chain.”

“We are the protocol. We do everything onchain,” Di Prisco said of his clients. “In terms of our liquidity. Our harvest distribution is fully automated through smart contracts. We are not trying to wrap around TradFi. So I think our technology will appeal more to the dApp space and advanced fintechs.

M0 announced the increase in June in a $35 million Series A funding round. Bain Capital led the round, which included participation from crypto market makers Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, GSR and Caladan. Until now, only M0 financially supported entities have the necessary POWER tokens to participate in protocol governance.

How does M work?

Di Prisco said the M^0 governance system was “built from the ground up” to address “voter apathy.” Each POWER token holder is required to vote on proposals at least once a month, and if they fail to do so, their tokens will be reduced by 10% and distributed proportionally to the remaining token holders in wrapped ETH.

It also encourages voting by awarding ZERO token rewards. ZERO tokens, which are currently closed to investors until next year, can only be found through voting and “basically that’s where all the economic flows of the protocol go,” Di Prisco said.

M is designed to be “the best approximation of low-risk cash holdings you can get,” said Di Prisco. Each issuer in the network creates its own special bankruptcy vehicle to hold MVCs and then allocates the proceeds from those holdings to pay an “interest rate” on M, which creates the protocol.

The network management then sets a “money earner rate” to be paid to the whitelisted addresses.

“Think of MD as an abstraction on the back end of all collateral management,” Di Prisco said. “Yield is the building block for other stablecoins with brands. It’s really our main thesis that every application wants to control the feature set and revenue distribution of the stablecoins in their ecosystem,” he said, including customizations like compliance features, smart contract features, and permission lists.

“If you’re thinking about a branded stablecoin, you should talk to us,” he said.

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