MoneyGram launches stablecoin for its global customer base with M0
1. The Partner
MoneyGram is one of the world's largest global payment networks, trusted by more than 60 million customers around the world. Founded over 85 years ago, the company operates nearly 500,000 retail agent locations and a digital ecosystem reaching millions of wallets, bank accounts, and cards globally.
MoneyGram's core business is cross-border money movement: helping families send money home, providing the infrastructure that connects cash and digital financial systems in real time, often supporting consumers in markets with limited banking access.
2. The Opportunity
MoneyGram distributes its products to 200+ countries and territories and saw an opportunity to expand its services through the addition of a balance in the MoneyGram app. To capture this opportunity, they understood that it would be most beneficial to have an infrastructure that could work in nearly any of these locations.
Being no stranger to stablecoins and non-custodial wallets, MoneyGram knew the advantages of using a blockchain-based infrastructure to store the balance. To take full advantage of the opportunity, especially from the economics of earning yield on a stablecoin, MoneyGram decided to issue their own stablecoin, MGUSD.
Luke Tuttle, Chief Product and Technology Officer, then asked the question, how can we build a resilient technical infrastructure with a global scale and adaptable to changes down the road from technology and regulation?
3. Why M0
MoneyGram needed infrastructure that would not box them into a corner. The stablecoin market is early, regulation is still forming, and the right answers on reserves, interoperability, and chain deployment are not settled. Any infrastructure choice that locked MoneyGram into today's assumptions would require a costly re-architecture tomorrow.
M0's modular infrastructure solved that directly. Three factors drove the decision:
- Configurable contract layer: MoneyGram controls how MGUSD's contracts are managed at the contract level: reserve storage, reward mechanics, and how the coin evolves over time. That control stays with MoneyGram, not with a third-party platform.
- Regulatory adaptability: M0 sits above Bridge's issuance capabilities as an additional framework layer, giving MoneyGram optionality to adapt as the regulatory environment shifts across jurisdictions, including what compliance looks like in one or two years. M0 gave MoneyGram separate, configurable layers for everything that makes up their stablecoin, including the freedom to choose regulated issuers and change them later.
- Forward compatibility: M0's architecture is designed so that new requirements, whether around reserves, chain interoperability, or contract features, can be incorporated without forcing MoneyGram to re-architect or re-issue. The infrastructure evolves with the product and the market.
"M0 gives us optionality in terms of how contracts are managed and how they could evolve over time, how we think about yield, how that yield is earned, and where the reserves can be stored. It is very important that we do not box ourselves into a corner."
— Luke Tuttle, Chief Product and Technology Officer, MoneyGram
4. The Build
MGUSD is natively issued on Stellar, with Bridge (a Stripe company) handling stablecoin orchestration and issuance via M0. Bridge leverages M0 for the minting and burning of MGUSD and is one of the U.S.-regulated issuers connected to the M0 stack. M0 provides the modular stablecoin infrastructure powering MGUSD.
To build MGUSD, MoneyGram first had to rebuild its underlying product architecture. The company deprecated its TradFi-based consumer balance product and re-architected its app entirely, moving to a non-custodial wallet as the foundation for the MoneyGram app globally. That rebuild was a prerequisite: without it, MGUSD could not be integrated natively into the product rather than bolted on as an adjacent feature.
MGUSD is purpose-built for MoneyGram's internal network. It serves two distinct functions: the consumer balance product in the MoneyGram app, and a treasury function running at a pace of nearly $2 billion annually in currency trading via stablecoin. The architecture keeps those uses separate. For treasury, MoneyGram uses whichever stablecoin carries the best economic advantage at any given time. For the consumer product, MGUSD gives MoneyGram direct control over reserve economics and reward management.
5. The Outcome
MGUSD launched in the U.S. market, with Colombia and El Salvador as the first international deployments. Customers in those markets can now hold a stable, dollar-denominated balance in the MoneyGram app, accessible 24/7 and convertible to local currency through MoneyGram's agent network.
The cost of delivering a consumer balance on blockchain is substantially lower than the traditional sponsor bank model. That efficiency directly expands who MoneyGram can serve, including consumers in markets where access to conventional banking is limited or unavailable.
For MoneyGram's customers, the infrastructure is invisible. The experience is a trusted balance in an app they already use. The stablecoin rails underneath it are what make global consistency possible across dozens of countries on a single technological stack.
6. What's Next
MGUSD is designed to expand progressively across MoneyGram's global network. As the balance product rolls out to more countries, the two-sided network vision becomes more significant: MoneyGram users in one country sending directly to MoneyGram users in another, with the app serving as the financial hub for a growing set of consumer services.
M0’s stablecoin infrastructure is what makes that evolution possible without re-architecting from scratch. As reserves, interoperability standards, and regulatory requirements develop, MoneyGram can adapt at the contract level rather than starting over. The infrastructure was built to move with the market.
