Overview

M0 is the universal stablecoin platform. With M0, developers can build their own application-specific digital dollars and embed those into any use case.

Stablecoins as a concept emerged a decade ago with the simple goal of representing a dollar on the blockchain. The initial wave of products in the sector helped settle trillions of dollars in crypto capital markets transactions over the last number of years.

But money is critical infrastructure, not a product. The initial generation of stablecoins was too simplistic in its design, and a new financial system simply can't be rewritten on top of it. M0 was founded to reconstruct the monetary stack from first principles, enabling a new wave of digital dollar applications to be built.

The M0 Model

Application developers value control and the ability to customize their technology stack for their context. One can think of fintech as the customization of dollars into a particular form-factor that favors the use case. Stablecoins allow for onchain programmability of digital dollar behavior. But one-size-fits-all stablecoins issued by centralized actors do not really allow for programmability. For that reason, the M0 platform was built to help developers create and program their own bespoke digital dollars.

In the M0 model, the traditional stablecoin concept was broken into two sub-components: the value component and the behavior component. The value component is represented by $M, a headless token that is the most pure representation of collateral composition. The behavioral component is represented by $M Extensions, the tokens that developers build with whatever customizations are required. $M Extensions can "wrap" $M to come into existence, or "unwrap" back into $M in order to interoperate with other digital dollar form factors.

On the other hand, money, as the key infrastructure that it is, should not belong to a single, monolithic company. M0 was built as an open and federated network. Multiple Minters can connect to the M0 protocol and pledge eligible collateral in order to mint $M. Validators independently verify the presence of eligible collateral and guarantee transparency across the network. The M0 protocol ensures purity of the $M stablecoin building block, as well as provides onchain clearing and interoperability across all the platform's custom stablecoins.

How to Use This Documentation Portal

Below is an overview of how this documentation portal is organized:

Getting Started

Articles in this section help you get started with understanding the M0 platform design, considering your own application-specific digital dollar and how to build a stablecoin using M0.

Technical Documentation

Articles in this section explain the technical considerations for the M0 protocol, and how certain key primitives work.

Technical Specifications

Articles in this section traverse through all the platform's smart contracts specifications and each variable and function details.

Resources

Articles in this section provide various miscellaneous resources for understanding and building on the M0 platform.