Ex-exec alleges firm diverted stablecoin venture, files lawsuit over fiduciary breach

A former executive at crypto consulting firm RWA Company has filed a lawsuit accusing the firm of wrongfully terminating his contract to seize control of a lucrative stablecoin project that turned into the blockchain payments infrastructure platform M0.

Max Glass sued RWA through the Delaware Chancery Court, alleging that RWA’s controlling members, Gregory DiPrisco and Joseph Quintilian, orchestrated a “fiduciary betrayal” to force him out and assume ownership of the company’s stablecoin business without his involvement or consent.

According to Glass, the two executives “coerced him into signing away his rights” before launching a separate venture that later became M0, in violation of their contractual duties to him and the firm.

Former executive he was ‘deceived’ out of RWA Company

In his legal complaint, Glass accuses DiPrisco and Quintilian of engaging in “a scheme of coercion, fraudulent inducement, and subsequent breaches of fiduciary duty,” claiming that they deliberately misled him to gain control of the company’s intellectual property and partnerships.

He propounded that the pair diverted RWA’s planned stablecoin project, developed in collaboration with German fintech startup CrossLend GmbH, into a new entity that eventually became M0.

M0 is not a stablecoin issuer like Tether or Circle on its own, but provides the infrastructure that has created several multi-million-dollar stablecoin projects, including MetaMask’s mUSD.

“The M0 enterprise was built upon the RWA Co.-CrossLend relationship,” Glass stated in the filing, also claiming he was wrongfully cut out from the upside of the project that came directly from his work at the RWA company.

CrossLend is a Berlin-based fintech company that digitizes and standardizes loan and mortgage data. Although it is not a crypto-native firm, Glass insists RWA’s collaboration with CrossLend was meant to create a stablecoin product backed by tokenized real-world assets. 

However, he alleges that his former partners used this partnership to quietly build a new company under a different name that excluded him from the venture’s ownership and future profits.

Glass’s attorneys believe there was a “pattern of concealment” from the defendants for several years, during which he says the defendants concealed the relationship between RWA, CrossLend, and M0. He is seeking unspecified damages, restitution, and recognition of his ownership interests tied to RWA’s original stablecoin project.

M0 fundraising in August

M0 is one of the more prominent players in the digital payments industry since it became a distributed platform helping institutions issue customized stablecoins using its underlying protocol.

Much different from centralized issuers such as Circle’s USDC, which never realized its plan for taking service providers under its Centre Consortium, M0’s allows several entities to issue their own stablecoins under a shared standard. Each issuer can “wrap” the base M0 coin with proprietary features for differentiation and customization.

In just one year since launch, M0 has facilitated the creation of four active stablecoins with a combined issuance of $325 million. The company closed a $40 million Series B funding round in late August, led by Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst. 

M0 fundraisers hit a total of $100 million with the input of Wintermute Ventures, ParaFi Capital, HackVC, Galaxy, Anthony Scaramucci’s SALT, and Bain Capital.  CEO Luca Prosperi said the platform presents a “greater autonomy” for fintech builders who prefer using the US dollar in digital form. 

“We want to empower the builders of great fintech products to actually control the digital dollar stack they use. The current stablecoin technology isn’t fit for that purpose,” he asserted.

The stablecoin market is now valued at around $308 billion and could surpass $1 trillion in market capitalization by the end of the decade, according to industry projections.

However, Europe’s top financial watchdog ESRB (European Systemic Risk Board), is asking regulators to “tightly” enforce the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework.

The ESRB’s report published last month revealed stablecoins Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are collectively backed by approximately $129 billion in bonds. It believes that under stress conditions, mass redemptions could kickstart a “bank run” scenario, where issuers would be forced to liquidate their reserves, and this could destabilize bond markets.

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.