Most people move money without ever touching it. We tap, swipe, and watch balances flicker on a screen, never questioning the invisible machinery that makes it all happen. Luca Prosperi did.

After years inside the beating heart of traditional finance. Morgan Stanley, hedge funds, private equity, he saw the truth: money isn’t real. It’s a digital illusion managed by institutions that have barely evolved in decades.

Then came the plot twist. a cancer diagnosis, a global lockdown, and the quiet clarity that life and money both needed rewiring.  Today, as CEO of M0, Prosperi is rebuilding the financial system from first principles, designing the rails that could one day move trillions, quietly, efficiently, and without permission.

The Problem Most People Don't Understand

Here's the uncomfortable truth: money doesn't actually exist the way you think it does.

"When you're talking with payment people, they think that the money they're moving from A to B is money that exists," Prosperi explains. "Money doesn't exist, it's a balance that exists in an account of a bank. It's virtual."

Behind every transaction lies a convoluted system of banks and payment processors that most people, even those working in finance, don't fully grasp. Prosperi witnessed this firsthand at Morgan Stanley, where he worked in the financial institutions group covering other banks as clients. "The rest of the bank has no clue what we do," he notes. "Bankers covering telecom or tech companies don't know how banks work, they don't know how money is created."

This opacity isn't just confusing, it's limiting. The entire financial system runs on antiquated infrastructure that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades. M0 exists to change that.

Building Infrastructure, Not Hype

M0 isn't trying to be the next viral crypto project. M0 is building the plumbing that future finance will run through.

"Infrastructure shouldn't be hypey or exciting for the common user. It should be quite dry," Prosperi says matter-of-factly. While other founders chase social media clout and vanity metrics, M0 has quietly raised over $100 million in funding and grown to a 50-person team distributed globally. Six months after launch, the platform already supports around $300 million in issuance, and several major partnerships are about to go live.

The vision is to create an open-ended protocol that allows different players to create and move digital money without relying on commercial banks or payment processors. Unlike closed ecosystems built by giants like Circle or Tether, M0's architecture is deliberately open. "We don't believe in that future," Prosperi says of centralized control. "We think it's a pretty bad, dystopian future."

Instead, M0 is building for a world where fintech and crypto merge completely. Where the next Robinhood or Revolut runs entirely on blockchain rails, and users never need to think about the infrastructure humming beneath their apps.

The Long, Lonely Road of Building

Success in crypto often looks glamorous from the outside, but Luka Prosperi is quick to dispel that myth.

"The life of a founder is a very lonely life. You have a lot of exposure, and you have a lot of pressure inside the company. You don't really have a lot of peers," he admits. "It seems very glamorous to be a founder of a company. It's not, it's pretty lonely."

The bootstrapping phase is particularly brutal. M0 won't consider itself past this stage until it reaches several billion dollars in issuance. Getting there requires "relentless work, deep connections, and deep pockets." The company is fighting for every ounce of adoption, without the luxury of organic growth, yet.

But Prosperi isn't complaining. He's built for this. His background as a professional endurance athlete and mountaineer trained him to embrace discomfort. "I enjoy the pain," he says bluntly. "You need to enjoy the pain." He echoes Jensen Huang's famous advice: "I wish you hardship and pain. I think the best lessons we can get are through pain."

His routine reflects this philosophy: early-morning wake-ups with his wife (a professional Ashtanga yogi), disappearing into nature for hours or days at a time, and maintaining the discipline of an athlete who once trained 20 hours a week. It's a lifestyle designed for endurance, not sprints.

What Success Actually Looks Like

M0's north star isn't flashy. It's the size of the network and the number of nodes that build on it. Prosperi wants M0 to intermediate hundreds of billions of dollars within five years, ideally over $10 billion in the next five alone.

"This is the deepest financial paradigmatic shift we will see in our lifetimes," he argues. "Crypto is going to do to money what the Internet has done to communications. It's going to democratize it. You won't need to own a bank to provide financial services."

The Bigger Picture

Prosperi knows revolutions rarely start with noise. They start with infrastructure. Invisible systems that change everything once they work. The goal is to make money honestly, not to make crypto louder.

Every day, his team pushes code that may never trend, but will eventually power the world’s most open financial network. For Prosperi, survival was philosophical. Pain forged perspective, and now that perspective is shaping the future of finance by rewriting what it means to trust.