On The Brink with Castle Island - Luca Prosperi (M0) on a Universal Stablecoin Platform (EP.637)

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Ria sits down with Luca Prosperi, CEO and Co-Founder of M0, a universal stablecoin platform that enables customization while preserving interoperability across assets. In this episode, we cover: Lessons from MakerDAO Drawing inspiration from the dual banking system Building a base asset that is decentralized, permissionless and ossified Issuing opinionated assets via wrapping and extensions while maintaining interoperability

Today I have on Luca as our guest, our guest of honor. He is the founder and CEO of M0, which is a decentralized stablecoin protocol and has a corresponding asset, which is M and is working on a bunch of cool things on top of M like wrapped stable coins, wrapped white labeled stable coins, extensions. and some other really cool stuff that I'm excited to get into in this conversation. But before we kick it off and get into the meat of everything, Luca, it would be awesome if you could give a quick intro. Tell us a little bit about your background, your time at MakerDow,

and maybe other experience kind of inspired you to launch and start M0. Yeah, absolutely. and thanks for having Miria. We were laughing before starting the recording that I'm here stuck in a thunderstorm in Brazil with no power doing this from the soul. And so I hope that you can, the listeners can hear the thunders in the background. I never know. We guys, a committed guest. I never know how good the AirPods are.

It cancelling the background noise. But yeah, I mean, I'll give you like a couple of minutes in three. production about myself and the origins of the M0 project. I'll try not to make it too personal. Today is actually a special date for me. You will understand why in a second. But I am a mathematician by background. I'm a mathematical economist.

I started my career working as a consultant for financial institutions at Oliver Weiman and spend the following 15 years advising, investing in financials. I joined Morgan Stanley as a financial institutions, banker, past business school in London, then became a hedge fund manager, private equity manager, investing in financial institutions. And most people who haven't spent time with financial institutions wouldn't know that actually serving financial institutions as an industry is a pretty niche thing. Even if you work in Wall Street, there is probably a group. of 20% of people that are deep, deep down in financials and understand financial institutions,

balance, etc. And the rest of the world hasn't know what the guy they're doing. I was one of those. I started working in crypto exactly five years ago, so relatively recent, although I do things 100%. So when I started, I really started. And the reason of my fascination with crypto was not trading about was actually this idea that some of the early day DFI protocols were having of reinventing money from first principal perspective. Most people don't know that money is not a payment product. Money is a leverage product and the way it is actually created is very theoretical and ephemeral and a product.

and a product of checks and balances that have always existed in the banking system but currently exist at the protocol level in crypto. And the project that really started my fascination was Maker. And I said that today is an important date for me because the reason why I had so much time to study this is that five years ago, first week of COVID, I was forced out of my job

because I received the absolutely unexpected diagnosis of cancer. I discovered I was affected by a rare form of blood cancer and I spent the six months after that trying to save my life successfully with isolation and chemotherapy. And during those months in a 20 square meter room, me and my wife, we had to entertain ourselves. So I started to write a sub-stack that became quite respected in this place called Dirt Roads and participate in some of those projects, including Maker. When I came out of the other side alive, it was really clear to me that I wanted to spend my time

doing meaningful stuff and building something I believed in instead of making older men richer than what they actually were already. And so I went full on. I spent the following couple of years trying to connect. maker is a protocol with the real word of lending participating in this initiative called the real word asset initiative, terrible name. And up to the point where I realized that those protocols

were great proofs of concept, but they were not really skittable in the institutional space. So after trying to be an activist in those protocol to put more checks and balances that actually decided to step down and together with Greg my co-founder actually launched M-Zero. And this was December 22. I just want to pause for one second and first of all say congratulations on the five-year mark. And I'm so sorry to hear that you must have had to go through such a grueling physical and mental challenge also at a time when COVID was happening.

And yeah, thank you for sharing that story. It's really inspiring to hear. Thanks a lot for the kind words. I'm not sorry at all. I feel it was the greatest privilege of my life to go through this. I think it's the most powerful propeller you have, i.e. transform me and turbocharged the impact they have on my own life and on the world. So I cannot say I hope other people go through the same stuff, obviously.

but what I can say to other people is that I hope they have the strength I had to capitalize on the pain that is inflicted on us sometimes. Thank you just so much for sharing that. Okay, so you brought up MakerDAO and you mentioned a little bit how, and maybe this wasn't just in reference to MakerDAO, but just generally how maybe such a model wouldn't scale for institutional offerings. Could you talk a little bit about why that's the case? Yes, absolutely.

And I also want to clarify that when I talk about institutional offering, I do not mention, I do not mean necessarily the boring, regulated, hyper-stiff banking word. What I mean is an institutional mindset of large scale instead of a retail gamified phenomenon. The institutions can actually be new institutions, right?

But I think there is a way of doing things that is professional and institutional-like which I, which was not the way of early-day protocols in crypto.

And it's obviously always a place I think in new companies and new industries. But to go, to be a bit more specific, I don't know how familiar the audience is

with Maker or the early-day Maker Dow. But Maker was the first real decentralized stablecoin protocol. Maker allowed holders of crypto collateral, like if to start and others who pledged this collateral in a repo form and finance a subset of that collateral in the form of dye, then could have been sold in the open market

to expand the long position or just as a financing tool. On the other side, the holders of this decentralized stable coin called Dai, they had the benefit of having a stable coin that was decentralized in nature. It was hyper-transparent and over-collateralized and it's very safe in the backing. I think I found this, this was an incredible, it is still an incredibly powerful mental framework. the so-called CDP-based model, which underpins also some of the system design of M-Zero. Now, why I think this was not skinnable,

I joined Maker thinking that Maker really had the chance to become the central bank of D5, so to say. And the idea we had at the time, it was like, okay, Maker, it cannot really scale too much because the collateral that is, that are, that is backing, die, is so volatile against the dollar that is very difficult to make this system capital efficient.

So you need to pledge a lot of collateral. You need to have very, very thick safety margins to make sure that the currency that is minted as a subset of that value is safe. And so why not using other type of collateral? Like, for example, U.S. Treasury collateral, which is abundant, is very safe by definition. so you can actually have very, very thin margins, and you can actually mint a token based on that type of collateral.

And we tried that at Maker, we actually, Maker, succeeded at some point, Maker $3 to $5 billion of treasuries that yield for the protocol. Maker at some point was the largest holder of USDA in the world with $5.5 billion dollars in the U.S.D in there was not making any money out of it. The problem is that the protocol, first of all, structurally, was designed, It was not designed for this. And then the governance of the protocol was heavily gamified. And this is a problem of some of these early day crypto projects.

So you had this idea of decentralized governance, anonymous governance, which is not really working because the people who actually bought the tokens were actually buying the tokens as a speculative asset rather than vote. And then you had very few people deciding the fate of DAOs and just like offloading the liabilities, the rest of the doubt. So it was not a very stable environment for connecting with financial systems. So I think it was a combination of original same type of design and a governance framework that was optimized

for velocity and galeification rather than for scale and thoroughness. I think this is not a problem only of Maker. I think it's a problem of several early-day projects. Actually, Maker survived and thrived by changing its mission from that of a decentralized central bank to that of some sort of like crypto native credit fund, which is what it is today. But then something about the model inspired you to launch M0.

And maybe specifically, you know, you describe M0 as a decentralized protocol. And I want to talk a little bit about that and the, importance of that relative to other stable coin models where there is a single centralized issuer that manages collateral in a centralized way. I think that is one of the beauties of the original maker was that it was decentralized and they did create a mechanism by which the asset that was minted was able to maintain its stability even though it was decentralized. Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, and I think the best way to do this is by analogy. It was actually centralized money frameworks like the ones of Circle and Heather are the weird ones, because we do not live in such a word today. And I think I can describe better my analogy. Currently, we live in this dual banking system. And I think that you have, you know, you have commercial banks interacting with the customers, and then those commercial banks are connected through a regulatory system and a central banking actor that is providing liquidity to the system and is also a lender of lost resort of sorts.

Now, the commercial banks are all different. Now, they create money by crediting our deposits. we think the deposits are all the same. They're not, right? So like if you have money with JPMorgan and money with a regional bank in some US state, for example, the credit profile of those banks are very different. So the money is technically not really fungible. The reason why it's fungible is because there is like this regulatory framework

and liquidity framework around it that guarantees some sort of interoperability during normal times. So we actually live in a decentralized money system where you have collateral distributed across several institutions, and then you have some sort of central connection point that glues all those different players. And why is this beneficial? Because obviously there are huge network effects. And money is useful when there is utility and interoperability of this form of money. So you know you can send your money, you can send money to different banks within a system, you can do stuff with it. And this is not the way early day issuers, civil con issues are working, right? If you are circle, you issue, you keep the reserves, you keep the money, you have this kind of permissioned proprietary token, and then you have to create your ecosystem around that token.

It's obviously dystopian to imagine that they would conquer the rest of the whole world with one issuer and is also unrealistic that you can have 20, 30, 40, 50 non-interoperable

vertical issuers that are competing one against the other. Funnily enough, like, I have a lot of respect for all the companies innovating in the space, but if you think about the Paxos model where Paxos is developing independent verticals for of their clients, okay, you need a stable coin, I'll build a stable coin for you.

It's cannibalizing its own business, right? If you have a success story, the next success, success story is actually eating into the liquidity of the previous success story, and it makes things more and more difficult. So in the maker system instead, it was a different story, right? It was closer to the dual banking system we have today in FIA, where you had different issuers, so different pledgers of collateral. they were storing the collateral in smart contracts, and those issuers were issuing the same token.

And the token was the same because ultimately the characteristic, the risk profile and the technological characteristics of those tokens were one. And for us, this was incredibly important. So when we designed them zero, we designed, first of all, a protocol that is, because the devil is always in the detail, right? We decide a settlement protocol that is ossified permission, less immutable and exists on mainnet, a governance module that is trying to control certain parameters of the protocol without the ability to actually rug pull or change the ownership

of the stable coin asset M. But any issuer, let's say anyone who is permission to issue M by pledging collateral is actually issuing the same token. So you can actually have something similar to the current bank system where you have a many-to-one-to-man infrastructure. You have many collaterals, many issuers that use the same standards, the same collateral-type standards, and they can issue the same asset. So there is shared liquidity, shared network effects, shared interoperability around this asset. And then on the other side, there are integrators that need to integrate with one asset only and not with tens of different assets, which is very impractical. And for us, for everyone in the maker-ecus

and this was like a crucial characteristic of the model that we think is absolutely non-negotiable. And something that not all the newcomers in the crypto world really appreciate until they need to develop those liquidity networks themselves. And they realize how expensive and difficult they are. Totally. So there's two things that I want to touch upon that you mentioned. One is this concept of, especially in the last maybe year, year and a half, you've had the introduction of many more stable coins to the market. And I think first on one hand, it's very exciting that stable coins are being adopted more broadly. There is integration of these assets outside of crypto.

I think that's awesome. And I think it's great that people are, you know, trying different models to see what works. But one thing I think about is that you have these closed loop systems in traditional finance and fintech. But let's just take the example of like PayPal, Venmo, cash app. And that's only in the U.S. And, you know, I think one of the things that we want to see happen is, these closed-loop systems to be able to talk to and interoperate with one another. But when you're launching multiple disparate stable coins without having any kind of like

underlying interoperability layer, in a sense, you are kind of recreating the silos that exist in fintech and traditional finance. So, yeah, have you thought about that? Yes, absolutely. And as you know well, like the crypto ethos is very different instead. The crypto ethos is that of open sourcing, of interoperability, of modularity. And we also, we see that of permissionlessness. We see the benefits of this.

And I think this step, this benefit is not actually, is not 100% appreciated by legacy financial institutions or even legacy fintech. dominant financial institutions. They're moving in a completely different direction, though. Exactly. Like, we absolutely do not want to do this. And interestingly, the way, what, so I think this is very fresh in our mind, but it's something that I really wanted to share is,

we first, when we built M0, M0 is a many-to-many middleware. So it's like a dual-sided marketplace ultimately. It's like a centralized balance sheet where on the one hand you have issuers on the other hand, you have users. We went to the issuers, and we started chatting with some, like,

legacy institution or fintech saying, why don't you issue interoperable asset? It's much better for you is to build equity, et cetera. It was like an ambitious version of what Paxos, I encourage are trying to do with a global donor. And those institutions were not very receptive. I think there is an obsession of conduct. control and there is also like a lack of understanding of certain dynamics, especially of

crypto market. Then we went on the other side and we went to the users. And we went to the users and we said, okay, guys, you're building protocols. You can actually embed digital money in your stack. What do you think about embedding an asset that is Christine is interoperable, can move around, You can swap it against the AT&USDC. You can actually partner with each other, creating interoperability between your use cases.

And we will aggregate any type of collateral behind the scenes for you and make it super simple in crypto-native. And they loved it. So suddenly from like struggling to actually have five conversations a month with knowledge institutions, we have been inundated by requests of integrators to actually extend the M token themselves into their own stack. and we have like tens of requests coming every week.

And then as soon as you have distribution power, then the other side of the marketplace gets excited and say, oh, wait a second, guys, you actually have access to like a huge network of use cases. Now, we want to mint this asset. Imagine if today you would give the ability to issuers to actually issue a white-labeled version of tether they can set into the market. Everybody will do it. So it's an interesting lesson.

that we have learned over the last few months. The one thing that we didn't mention when we were talking about, like, why we're seeing so many businesses want to launch their own stable coin or, like, white label of stable coin, is that they are not, you know, if they use a stable coin like circles, USDC or Tether's USC, they are not currently getting any of the interest on those assets. So maybe historically the rationale behind launching a native platform-specific stable coin was to be able to capture that yield. And yeah, it's definitely interesting to hear that even though you are kind of presenting a solution that allows them to capture that yield and be interoperable with other assets, they are still like, we're. want control of the infrastructure? Is that an accurate maybe understanding of what you're saying

as it relates to like the larger institutions and fintechs today, at least? Yes, it is accurate, but I think it's also part of a learning process. I know I cannot mention the institutions, but we have spoken to teams of very large fintech institutions on a global scale that have developed non-interoperable proprietary stable coin stacks. that are still useful for their own internal uses, right, to transfer money internationally or to act as a stable lag of their own exchanges, et cetera. But at the end of the journey, they realized that nobody would have used those instruments outside of the limitations of their apt gardens.

And they kind of regret that they had gone in that direction. I think there is a lot of learning here. I think there is some sort of natural tendencies. towards control in financial institutions, plus a genuine concern for regulatory issues. But I think the power of crypto capital markets is exactly this open sourcing and interoperability. So I think it is a process.

In the same way, you have seen banks at the very beginning promoting the concept of permissioned chains, then they realized that those permission blockchains that were nothing else, then nothing different from internal databases, and ultimately they have embraced open blockchains because the power, the power is like the potential is completely different. And I think this is also a path that will bring us also traditional fintech institutions.

I think it is a process. But yes, your point is absolutely correct. Talking about yield only is like looking at a finger pointing at a moon and just obsessing about a finger and not the moon. The yield is one component of control, but there is much more. I mean, ultimately, money, its infrastructure is not only yield.

It's compliance, it's like listing, with missing, is compulsability is much more. But I'm very optimistic that those, even the most traditional institutions will realize that. I think that with a genius act coming,

we will see like a long, like tens of hundreds of dollar delaminated stable coins coming and then some sort of natural Darwinian effect integrating those and making them more open, more interoperable

at some level of the start. I also want to touch on another thing that you mentioned, which is, okay, we were talking to these large institutions. They're going through this process, which they just need to go through to kind of get to the other side. But in that process, you realize that there are integrators and use cases that are today excited about the value proposition of N0. So can you talk a little bit about who is using M0 today and like how are they using it? Are they using M the asset natively or are they kind of using this power of wrapping M and extensions as well? Yeah. So these are the early days of M0, right? We launched the infrastructure effectively Q3, end of Q3, 2024.

We don't know what the equilibrium will be. We really think it is just like a novel money market instrument or some sort of wholesale stable coin or meta stable coin, how you want to call it. We think really that most of use cases will happen around this wrapping concept or extensions concept, as we call it. But we are really receptive to the market. Currently, the end float is very early. Alphabet is in rap M form, which is like the rap M is simply a D5. simply a defy-friendly wrapper. So it's, let's say, it's in naked form.

And the rest is in an extension form. So we have two extensions live. One is usual. So usual, most people know usual is a defy crypto-native, high-yield project. They are basing their reserves, though, largely on risk-free assets. Now, a not insignificant portion of those

reserves is actually sitting in usual M, which is an extension of M that is dedicated to usual with certain functionalities of control, like wrapping and wrapping, non-interoperability, because for security reasons, they use this as a reserve asset. The other issuer, the other extender is Noble. It's noble. Most people know Noble as the issue of USDC on Cosmos. Novel is an issuer of assets in the cosmos ecosystem, and we have known the team, long time and they are awesome. Ultimately, this business is made by humans and we really like each other as human beings. And they decided to actually launch their own dollar because they said, okay, we're doing the heavy lifting and doing the distribution for someone else's assets.

Why should we do it? Going back to your point and why should we keep making money for circle or tether. And they built the Nobel dollar, USDN, entirely on M-0 infrastructure. So they are actually wrapping M with additional yield distribution functional distribution functionalities and control and they are issuing it in the ecosystem.

We have received tens, probably 30 to 40, requests of integrators of different kinds to actually do the same. So I think that really we believe M is going to be some sort of wholesale behind the scenes

reserve asset, not only asset, reserve infrastructure that actually aggregates collateral, bets, collateral streams yield, takes care of interlock across chains, etc. And then distributors will bring this asset to the ultimate clients with additional function committees. Going back to the analogy I was making before, they say 10 years ago, the distribution of money were the bank branches. So you had money there with additional features. And then behind the bank, there was some sort of like central bank line. In the future, we will have branded tokens or fintech applications.

that are your distribution network, and behind the scenes, there is actually M-Zero infrastructure that is streaming the money and the yield in between them. Very interesting. So in the examples that you gave with usual and Nobles dollar, are they essentially interoperable with one another? Talk about how the interoperability between those is enabled via M-0? It really depends what every extension wants to do. In the case of Nobel and usual, actually, the wrapping and unwrapping is permission.

So they only, there are very limited parties who can actually wrap and unwrap the end token to go to usual dollar or Nobel dollar. Right. But they say that you are a user that has the ability to do both. You could actually atomically take the usual and unwrap it and going back to the M source and mint Nobel dollar with M in one block. You could do that. So I think that the idea is those extensions or anyone in case an extension has permissionless wrapping and wrapping can unwrap back to the raw material and move this raw material around and rewrap freely.

A very practical example is liquidity. Most people who are not in stable coin lander appreciate the importance of liquidity. Liquidity is everything in stable coins. So there is a point. pool, uniswap V3 pool currently of around $20 million, which is an N-USDC pool. So you can actually swap M for USDC and up to $20 million, or depending on the liquidity there is in the pool, the composition of the pool, within one tick, let's say, with no slippage. And both usual and Nobel Anne are actually pointing towards the same pool.

So if usual and Noble wants to, they want to actually access the U.S. DEC liquidity for off-ramping on doing other things, they're actually using the same liquidity value. They don't need to build two liquidity values. And this becomes more and more important because contrary to the verticalized system where every, like if you have PayPal USD and then you have global USD and they're different, they are actually fractionalizing their own liquidity here, the more parties you bring in more liquidity actually centralizing one venue and benefits everyone.

So the liquid issue. Yeah. Network effect. Yeah. Exactly. For liquidity, which is very, very important. Yeah. That is a huge issue.

I think people underappreciate how difficult it is to bootstrap liquidity for a net new stable coin, like even if you are a large institution. So I think that's really interesting. Another thing you mentioned is on and off ripping. And I've been thinking about on and off ramping a lot and how the more stable coins you have, like the more integrations that need to be built. But I'm assuming in the M system, if you create an on and off ramp into M, then that benefits all of the wrapped assets and extensions that built on top of M.

Is that right? Correct. Absolutely. Yeah, I think on and off ramping generally is like an underappreciated or an underrated challenge, rather, that people don't talk about enough. But maybe just taking a broader view, like, what else do you think are the big challenges to stable coin adoption? challenges, but I strongly believe we are observing the most relevant paradigmatic shift in finance of our lifetimes. So I really think that builders that are building in this space, they should be absolutely excited of the potential this space has. is immense. Currently, I read somewhere that stable coins currently represent slightly less than 1% of

M2 money supply, which is ridiculously low. And it's enough to have created one company that is more profitable in Goldman Sachs and another company that is also quite profitable. The tailwind is incredible. Now, I think that for every paradigmatic shift is a bit of a balance because I think that you breaking. So first of all, it's a highly regulated space, partially in good faith, partially because obviously incumbents, they survive through regulation. I don't like when people try to survive through regulation. We have seen it also in Staportland, thrive through your products,

not through lobbying. But obviously, it's a heavily regulated and lobby environment. So that's, that makes it very challenging. And also what is challenging is that who is also to understand who is your regulator? Because like we live now, the crypto capital markets and stable coins by definition are a global financial instrument and they move freely around. So who is your regulator? Right. It's very difficult to limit the free flowing of assets that can actually move around in DFI.

You can try, but it's absolutely impossible. I think there needs to be some sort of pragmatic approach of founders to build something that in principle makes sense and is very solid and sound. But there is not like a regulatory rule book, unfortunately. One works for the US, the other works for Europe, the other works for Singapore, the other works for PURPS or whatever. But I think this is difficult, right, because this is something that wasn't existing before. And I mean, the internet thrived because it was operating in a non-regulated environment.

Finance is different. And then there is obviously this cultural shift of, you know, I worked in an investment bank myself. Like investment banks are very innovative and very, very, frontier-oriented compared to commercial banks, but still they're hyper-conservative and they're protecting their own turf. So that makes it difficult. At the same time, though, and this is, I think, is the realist in me, not the optimist in me, is the technological and architectural superiority of digital money versus fiat-based money. It's so obvious that

Haltinkly is inevitable. And some of those new projects that emerge in a crypto-native way, they just grow so fast. So I think that even building for the native crypto economy is enough to let this sector explode.

Like Circle always positions itself, for example, I mean, we talk only about Circle and Tether because obviously these are the two dominant forces, but Circle always position itself as a tech company, regulatory-friendly, payment-oriented,

but the reality, is that circle is where it is because it's dominating defy. Crypto economy is very big and grows very fast. You might spend years trying to pitch a regulated exchange to actually embed your stable coin, and there are a lot of gatekeepers, and then suddenly someone funds hyperliquid and hyperliquid as $2 billion of users' funds floating around

in less than two years, right? So I think that the velocity of the newcomers is shockingly high, and we are building for those. So we are building for those type of guys, for those builders. People they want to silence, they want to disrupt, they want to build things,

they want to go fast, and they want to build with other builders. Unfortunately, it's more feature-proof than traditional incumbent's opinion. I was going to ask you about how you think stable coins

will increasingly be used and diversify their use case over time. And I think most of the time you hear people talking about their adoption within traditional finance, traditional payments, but less so about how they will grow as the set of use cases within this space grows and as more native crypto applications are developed and launched. I think it's a combination. I think that definitely the latter, I believe, but also, I think in the 2010s, we have seen giant fintech apps coming to market as leak front-hand based on antiquated backend. So I remember, like, I lived in London for more than 10 years, and I was actually there, like, when the Revolut team pitched at the Google Accelerator for the Revolute Precede for the FX credit card. I think it was 2014 or something like that.

Yeah, it was actually cool. Like one of my best friends for business school actually won that competition. And I angeled into his company and Revelto was number two and I did not. It was like you came for. But apart from the jokes, like at the time, like, you know, Revalude for a long time, they were a beautiful product. But behind it, there was Lloyd's TSB, which was definitely not a very innovative traditional bank. So in my opinion, we are going to see an emergence also.

of new generational fintechs or neobanks 3.0 that will build directly on stable coin and crypto rails. So the users will not see the difference. Yeah, they will have a better experience, but the velocity of new value prop will increase massively because these guys will build on top of decentralized infrastructure, mainly markets in stablecoin rails. And even from the deal flow perspective, we are seeing a lot of companies that are positioning themselves as stablecoin native neobanks, both targeted at individuals and businesses. So I'm very excited to see how financial services powered by stable coins evolve and introduce new types of products and just make financial. generally, faster and more efficient and cheaper to access. Yes, absolutely.

And it will happen. I think it's inevitable and it's a very exciting time to be alive. So as we wrap up, I guess looking forward into 2025, what has you most excited about what's coming up with M0 and, the space more broadly? The fact that stable coins are now mainstream in the narrative and there is going to be more

regulatory clarity around stable coins. There is more institutional awareness of stable coins. We are reaching a different stage of maturity. Obviously excites me as a builder in the space. There is so much to do. So M0 is really

an inflection point. Our infrastructure is maturing. We are really finding product market fit. We will have tens of integrations by the end of the year, hopefully, and 10x or 20x, the type of liquidity that we have in the system today. And that excites me very much. And as always, it's all about execution. And execution keeps you very busy. Building companies and running companies is an intense experience, not for everyone. So that's something that excites me a lot to grow M-Zero as a project and make it relentlessly and obsessively perfectionist. At the same time, yeah, at the same time, the macro is great. So I think

this combination of macro tailwinds, regulatory clarity, institutional maturity, and at the same time, seeing a company that really can step up in terms of scale, capital endowment, integrations, product market feat and tin, I think is very exciting. And a lot of things will happen in the next nine months. So it's a great time, I think, in this industry. I personally am not really worried about market volatility in crypto and tech in general. I think that very good investors, in my opinion, are not worried either because we're building tech. We're not building trading conduits.

But we will see why we'll get there. I was actually very nervous when I saw the excessive excitement at the end of 2024, beginning in 2025, around everything that had connections with crypto, right? I don't like when the hype becomes too intense. Moves the head of the product. Yeah, exactly. Agreed. Well, I'm very excited to see the value proposition of M0 play out over the year.

I think it's a very elegant and interesting architecture. and I resonate a lot with some of the core ideals around interoperability, especially. I think that is one of the biggest value propositions of the rails that we're building. And I want to thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you about everything. So grateful to you for sharing your story with us. Thank you for coming on. Thanks again, Ria.