A conversation with Antonina Norair, CTO, and Pierrick Turelier, a Senior Smart Contract Engineer at M0 about building a permissioned liquidity pool using Uniswap v4 hooks, their stablecoin platform for builders, and their vision for bringing transparency to the stablecoin ecosystem.

What got you into crypto?

Antonina: In 2018, I got very excited about smart contracts and the possibilities of what can be built on-chain. I learned Solidity and went to ConsenSys, which was the first big Ethereum hub. As Ethereum grew, I moved to DeFi, working at Compound, which was one of the protocols that kickstarted DeFi summer. Overall, I'm really excited about the opportunities that crypto and smart contracts give to builders.

Pierrick: After the 2017-2018 bull run, I was looking for a career change because while I enjoyed the design aspect of front-end work, I was frustrated with how traditional banks operate. Crypto offered an opportunity to build something better, something different and more decentralized."

Tell me about M0 and its mission.
M0 is a stablecoin platform for builders. We create an actual stablecoin and extensions of our core on-chain building block, $M. What makes M0 unique is that we use our $M token (an immutable building block) to build other people's stablecoins. We've found a strong product-market fit - looking at other established companies such as Stripe who are now announcing similar concepts, we’re assured that 'stablecoin as a service' is a needed market solution.

The entire protocol is decentralized, using governance tomanage entities like Minters, Validators and Earners. Our stablecoin is backed by US Treasury bills with maturities from 0-90 days. Minters are required to periodically update their collateral on-chain where anyone can verify it. We're bringing transparency to the space, offering more resilience to the ecosystem and allowing companies to create their own stablecoins in a decentralized manner.

When and why did you start building in the Uniswap ecosystem?
We're really excited about how Uniswap continues to innovate, especially with the latest release and deployment of v4 and hooks. Both of us went through the Uniswap Hook Incubator, and we were very impressed by the quality of the material, including reviews of concentrated liquidity concepts before moving to v4. The participants were equally impressive—there were founders, auditors, PhD mathematicians, and researchers.

On utilizing v4, M0 has on-chain liquidity primarily for our stablecoin—we have pools set up with USDC and wrapped $M on mainnet, but we're looking to expand to other chains. These are permissionless pools with very strict conditions on price range. All our liquidity is within one tick, serving as the source of liquidity for our extensions and partners. We are building our own Uniswap v4 hook for managing this liquidity on-chain.

What advice do you have for other hook builders?
First, explore what Uniswap v4 has to offer: in addition to hooks, it has many interesting features and optimizations like flash accounting and overall gas savings through its singleton architecture.

For any project with on-chain liquidity, we’d advise exploring the possibilities of Uniswap v4 hooks and how they can optimize flows. Uniswap v4 represents a move toward more modular architecture, where you can build your features into hooks while reusing highly secure, audited code without the need to fork the codebase.

To summarize: Learn the architecture of v4, understand what hooks provide, and if there's a need, definitely build a Uniswap v4 pool with a hook.

How can people get involved with M0, and what's next?
For engineers specifically, check out our smart contracts. We have many interesting features, including distribution of yield in stablecoins and innovative designs for wrappers.

We're excited to launch our permissioned and audited hook to help with liquidity management. We aim to launch in mid-June to early July, following the completion of audits.

The hook will allow us to enforce the strict price range conditions necessary for our stablecoin liquidity while providing a permissioned environment suitable for institutional participants.

Note: The views expressed herein may not reflect the views of the Uniswap Foundation. This interview is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice.