He spent eight years at Circle helping build USDC. Then he left to argue the world does not need another USDC. It needs thousands of them. Meet Joao Reginatto, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at M0. At Circle he was VP Product for Stablecoins and oversaw the development and launch of USDC and EURC. In August 2023 he joined M0, a platform built on the premise that the model he had just spent eight years perfecting does not scale to what comes next. A stablecoin today is a product. One company holds the reserves, owns the brand, controls the contract and keeps the yield. Build on it and you inherit all four decisions. 🗨️ "You can't call it infrastructure if you have to be married to the issuer." M0 splits the stack. Regulated entities hold reserves. Developers control token logic, compliance rules, permissions and where the yield goes. One shared liquidity primitive sits underneath, so a thousand branded dollars do not become a thousand isolated pools. The numbers: 📈 $100M+ raised. $35M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) Crypto in 2024, $40M Series B from Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital and Endeavor Catalyst 📈 $300M+ in platform supply as of July 2025, up 215% from the start of that year 📈 Newly issued stablecoins above $10M in supply grew 89% last year Who is building on it: ✅ MetaMask USD, via Stripe's Bridge ✅ PYUSDx, with MoonPay and PayPal ✅ MoneyGram's MGUSD on Stellar, with M^0 building the mint and redeem contracts ✅ Exodus, 1Money, Noble, Usual, KAST, Playtron ✅ Anchorage Digital, on regulated US issuance His philosophy: 💡 "The premise is that money is plural. In the traditional world, every commercial bank issues a slightly different version of the same currency. We accept that because there's strong interoperability. In crypto, that's missing." 💡 "The value is at the edge. It's the apps that build trust with users. That's where the upside belongs." 💡 "Infrastructure that operates within a silo is a product." What's next? Whether companies will issue their own dollars is settled. MoneyGram, MetaMask, PayPal's ecosystem and Exodus have already answered it. The open question is who captures the value. In the closed model, the issuer keeps the reserve yield and the switching cost. In the open model, the issuer becomes replaceable and the app keeps the customer. That is the real fight, and Reginatto named it before most of the market did. Catch Joao on stage Stablecon in DC 9-10 September
The open model makes sense, but the real test is redemption fungibility across issuers. In cross-border payments, users care less about who issued the dollar and more about whether it settles reliably in the markets they operate in.
💡 This split puts the operational burden—licensing, reserve management, and compliance—on the issuer layer, while the app keeps the customer relationship. The infrastructure only works if those regulated issuers stay interchangeable on redemption quality.
Dennis Owusu-Sem 📌 The shift from products to infrastructure changes who captures value: the closer you are to the customer, the stronger the moat. That is why discoverability and trust at the application layer matter so much. Great write, Dennis.
This shift reminds me of how Brazil’s payment rails evolved: fragmented brands with strong backend interoperability. The magic is in that invisible layer nobody notices until it works seamlessly.
If issuers become replaceable, the moat moves to brand and interface. A thousand branded dollars only works if users can tell instantly which dollar they're holding.
Not sure — as in "at all" — a bucket full of different USD stablecoins add any value. A dollar is a dollar. Potato potato. Being able to use M0 (great name!) for tokenisation is an altogether different proposition — and creates a good alternative to the usual suspects.
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Joao Reginatto a legend of the game, got one of the best!
Thousands of issuers only avoid fragmenting liquidity if reserves and redemptions are fungible; shared contracts alone do not make the dollars interchangeable.