The Builders' Dilemma: Why Stablecoin Infrastructure Must Stay Open

Find the full report, Dollar Supremacy, created in partnership with Range, here.

‍

Stablecoins are having a moment. Financial services builders, neobanks, and fintechs across the globe are leaning in with real energy and real capital. Stablecoins deliver on a genuinely compelling promise of a new global infrastructure for moving money cheaply, instantly, and to anyone, anywhere anytime. But before the industry gets too carried away, it needs to settle one question that will define the next decade of financial services: are stablecoins products, or are they infrastructure?

‍

Stablecoins Are Infrastructure. Treat Them That Way.

The most forward-thinking fintechs and neobanks are already building user experiences that abstract stablecoin usage entirely behind a clean UI layer. Their customers never hear the word "stablecoin." They just see balances. They just move money. The implementation details are invisible as they should be. This is precisely how infrastructure behaves. Nobody asks which routing protocol carried their email.

From that lens, stablecoins promise something important for financial services builders: freedom. Freedom from the archaic banking-as-a-service model defined by slow rails, geographic limitations, banker's hours, and dependency on legacy institutions never designed for the pace of the modern digital economy. Stablecoins are programmable money that can be shaped to nearly any use case, carrying the inherent benefits of a global, always-on, nearly free settlement layer.

The problem is that most builders are not yet fully claiming it.

‍

The Convenience-Control Trade-Off

Today, the vast majority of builders working with stablecoins are doing so on top of one of two well-established options: Tether's USDT or Circle's USDC. The reasons are understandable. Both are reputable and already accepted as money by an enormous global network. Liquidity and network effects are genuinely powerful, and for a builder trying to move fast, the convenience is difficult to pass up.

But there is a trade-off embedded in that convenience. When you build your business on top of an incumbent stablecoin, you are building inside their walls. The promise of programmability is substantially constrained, because the issuer holds the keys and only they can truly shape the technology's behavior over time. The product roadmap, policy decisions, and evolution of the underlying technology are not yours to direct. You become a tenant, not an owner.

This mirrors the very command-and-control model that defines the banking-as-a-service paradigm builders were hoping to move beyond. The infrastructure has changed; the dependency structure has not. A useful way to frame it: infrastructure that operates within a silo is a product. Infrastructure that operates within an ecosystem is a market. The question builders should be asking is which one they are actually building on.

‍

The Fragmentation Myth

A powerful counter-narrative has taken hold. Building your own application-specific stablecoin, the argument goes, is risky, complicated, and above all, it causes fragmentation. That word has become something of a bogeyman, invoked to steer builders back toward established options. More recently, vertically integrated platforms have emerged offering single-vendor solutions spanning from the blockchain layer all the way up to payments - wallets, on/off ramps, application-specific stablecoins, and everything in between. The pitch is convenience. The underlying structure is another form of concentrated dependency.

We think a portion of the market will push back. Sophisticated builders will recognize that owning a meaningful part of their stack, including the stablecoin layer, is not an unnecessary burden. It is, in many cases, a competitive advantage.

And fragmentation deserves a more honest treatment than it has been getting. Look at nearly every thriving product market. Cars come in thousands of makes and configurations. Fashion spans a vast range of styles and brands. Content on the internet is created and distributed by billions of individuals across every conceivable format. These markets are deeply fragmented, and they thrive precisely because of it.

What makes fragmentation work is not product uniformity. It is open standards and common foundations. Cars are endlessly diverse, but roads follow standard dimensions and fueling systems adhere to international standards so any vehicle can fill up anywhere. Clothes span every imaginable style, but sizing systems are standardized enough to make choice navigable. The internet supports an incomprehensible diversity of services because the underlying protocols are open, shared, and standardized. There is no principled reason digital money should work differently.

‍

What Open Infrastructure Actually Looks Like

Financial services builders deserve a genuine choice, one that allows them to design stablecoin infrastructure suited to their business and long-term strategy, without surrendering control of the things that matter most. This path carries more responsibility than plugging into an established option, and builders who go down it should do so with open eyes. But the barriers can be substantially reduced, and the foundation beneath it should be genuinely open.

That is the problem M0 is working to solve. M0 is a platform that enables builders to design their own application-specific stablecoin and connect with best-fit issuer partners to bring it to life. Every stablecoin built on M0 is grounded in a standard, open foundation - meaning portability across issuers, so builders can change issuing partners without rebuilding from scratch, and easier liquidity flow across stablecoins that share standardized mechanisms for issuance and redemption. The plurality of solutions that emerges from this model is the natural output of a healthy, competitive market - provided the foundation underneath is open and interoperable.

‍

Builders Deserve Choice

Stablecoins represent the next generation of infrastructure for financial services, a meaningful evolution beyond banking-as-a-service, with the genuine promise of a global, always-on, nearly free monetary layer. But that promise is only fully realized if the infrastructure beneath it remains open. Closed infrastructure, however reputable the brand or deep the liquidity, ultimately recreates the constraints builders are trying to move past. It converts infrastructure into a product, and a market into a dependency.

Money is plural. Different businesses, users, and use cases will call for different approaches. Open and standard infrastructure can accommodate that plurality, delivering the full benefits of this new monetary era without asking builders to choose between capability and control.

The internet did not build the modern world by anointing a winner and consolidating everything around it. It established a foundation, agreed on some standards, and let an extraordinary diversity of platforms and business models flourish on top. Stablecoin infrastructure should follow the same path. Builders deserve nothing less.

‍

M0 is the shared infrastructure where businesses launch stablecoins and financial institutions power them.

‍

Build with M0: m0.org