2.1. Actors

Actors are relevant participants (roles and entities) within the M^0 ecosystem. Only a subset of the Actors (so-called Permissioned Actors) are explicitly approved through Governance, while the rest is explicitly, albeit more loosely, identified as part of the Adopted Guidance.

The following diagram displays a schematic view of the Actors within the M^0 ecosystem and how they connect to external parties (i.e. parties whose practices are not covered by the Adopted Guidance) and contracts that need to be in place between Actors. The list of Actors is defined below.

Minter: The Minter is an entity considered orphaned from the risk of exogenous insolvency, operated by a separate entity responsible for business operations that is in place to further distance the Minter from bankruptcy issues (referred to here as the BD Minter). The Minter owns the private key associated with a public address that is permissioned by Governance to interact with a minting smart contract in order to mint M against a sufficient Collateral Balance, represented by Notes which are issued by the SPV (see below for details) and held on the Minter’s balance sheet.

The Minter is not allowed to conduct any other business or take on any other liabilities except the M balance it owes to the Protocol and the contractually defined liabilities vis-à-vis the BD Minter.

BD Minter: The BD Minter is the business development entity that performs the operational obligations of the Minter and contractually absorbs any and all potential liabilities arising from agreements with service providers of the Minter. While the suggested exclusive relationship between the Minter and the BD Minter should not be overly prescriptive, we emphasize that this provision aims to maintain liability segregation, keeping all non-minting responsibilities away from the Minter.

SPV Operator: The SPV Operator manages the portfolio of collateral in the SPV on behalf of the SPV but for the benefit of a Minter’s business operations. The SPV Operator also acts as selling agent in the context of a wind down (as described in Obligations Outside of the Normal Course of Business) and can even wind down a Minter in cases where the Minter is unable or unwilling to comply with the Protocol rules.

SPV: The SPV is the orphaned and insolvency-remote legal owner of the Eligible Collateral, available financial resources, or of any other asset which is managed by the SPV Operator.

Validator: The Validator independently verifies that the amount of collateral to be published on-chain appropriately exists and is compliant with appropriate eligibility criteria. While, in the current construct and based on the Adopted Guidance, existence means physical existence in the accounts at the custody bank in the name of the SPV, we expect the role of Validator to evolve jointly with the evolution of the nature of the underlying available collateral (e.g. appropriate tokenization).