Exponential Episode 24: Stablecoin Innovation

In this episode of Exponential, Joao Reginatto, chief strategy officer at M0, joins to discuss the future of digital money and the role M0 is playing in making stablecoins more customizable, composable, and interoperable.

As Reginatto explains, M0 is building “an operating system for digital money” — a platform that allows institutions and application developers to create their own tailored forms of stablecoins, all while inheriting a shared set of interoperable standards.

“The premise is that money is plural,” Reginatto says. “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 — and that’s what M0 is working to fix.”

While the current landscape is dominated by a few stablecoin issuers, he predicts a future of fragmentation — with fintechs, platforms, and even brands issuing their own versions of programmable money.

M0 is focused on enabling that shift by lowering the technical barriers and helping issuers and developers build with shared components: “You can extend it to be Joao’s dollar or Daniel’s dollar. You can customize certain behaviors. We’ve never had this kind of technology for money before.”

USDX, Powered by M0: The Native Dollar of the Verifiable Economy

The Nexus Foundation is launching USDX — the native dollar of the Nexus economy — in collaboration with M0, the digital money operating system.

NexusNexus

Much of the episode focuses on interoperability — both as a design principle and as a requirement for scaling real-world usage. Instead of routing every stablecoin transfer through an exchange, M0 enables what Reginatto calls “true programmability,” destroying one token and reconstituting it in another form without price discovery or friction. “It’s like programmable inheritance,” he explains. “We express value on a digital ledger in a way that’s modular, efficient, and extensible.”

As stablecoins become more central to global financial infrastructure, Reginatto sees regulatory clarity as key to continued innovation. He supports rules that make the system more equitable — especially for smaller applications — but cautions against conflating reward-sharing among ecosystem participants with direct yield to end users. “The value is at the edge,” he says. “It’s the apps that build trust with users. That’s where the upside belongs.”

Looking ahead, his prediction is simple: the stablecoin space is just getting started. “If you count the number of stablecoins announced by fintechs or crypto companies,” he says, “by the end of 2026, we’ll be seeing at least one a week.”