How does a startup team from a major payment company reconstruct the stablecoin payment sector with differentiation?

Written by: Grok, Doubao

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

On July 15, 2026, stablecoin payment infrastructure company Cyclops officially announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing round, led by Nava Ventures, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures, and Global PayTech Ventures; after this round of financing, Kevin Chenault, a partner at Nava Ventures, joined the company's board of directors.

This Series A funding comes just about four months after Cyclops completed an $8 million seed round in March 2026. The seed round was led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from F-Prime and Shift4 Payments. In total, across both funding rounds, Cyclops has raised $28 million in less than six months, all of which is equity financing.

Cyclops is headquartered in Miami, Florida, with an overseas office in Vienna, Austria. The company is positioned as a stablecoin infrastructure service provider focused on serving the payment industry, providing integrated stablecoin technology solutions to payment service providers (PSP), acquirers, and payment processors.

According to official disclosures, the platform's cumulative transaction volume has surpassed $2 billion, with operations covering 150 countries, holding over 100 related compliance licenses globally, and expanding its merchant network to 300,000, with a recent month-on-month growth rate in transaction volume reaching 350%.

Source:Cyclops

Team Background: Payment Veterans Starting Anew

The core team of Cyclops consists of seasoned professionals from the payment and cryptocurrency industries. The three co-founders previously jointly established The Giving Block, a cryptocurrency donation platform focused on non-profit organizations, which was later acquired by payment company Shift4 Payments in 2022. After the acquisition, the three led the cryptocurrency and stablecoin business department within Shift4.

• Alex Wilson: Co-founder and Co-CEO, has been building cryptocurrency and stablecoin infrastructure since 2018. During his tenure as head of cryptocurrency at Shift4, he spearheaded the development of merchant acceptance and settlement products for stablecoins.
• Pat Duffy: Co-founder and Co-CEO, co-founded The Giving Block with Wilson and co-led the cryptocurrency and stablecoin department after the Shift4 acquisition.
• David Johnson: Co-founder and President, has an international technology lawyer background, responsible for designing Cyclops' global licensing architecture and compliance strategy.

From left to right: David Johnson, Alex Wilson, and Pat Duffy. Source:Cyclops

Other key members include Lindsay Wysocki (COO), Dan Savitt (Chief Compliance Officer for the U.S., former Global Chief Compliance Officer at Coinbase), Willy Bardiot (Product Director), among others. The company continues to recruit talent from organizations like Coinbase, Fiserv, and JPMorgan. As of the Series A funding, the Cyclops team has grown to 31 employees and plans to double its team size by the end of the year.

Cyclops team. Source:Cyclops

Pain Points and Technical Solutions

Stablecoins enable 24/7 instant settlements at costs far lower than traditional cross-border payment channels. According to data from DefiLlama, since 2024, the market value of stablecoins has grown by 137%, nearing $310 billion. The GENIUS Act signed in July 2025 further provided a federal regulatory framework for stablecoin issuance in the U.S., making stablecoins a "necessity" for payment companies, rather than an option.

However, payment companies face significant issues with technical fragmentation when adopting stablecoins. The founders’ firsthand experiences at Shift4 serve as a typical example: each new stablecoin capability requires separate connections to multiple external providers for custody, KYC/AML, liquidity, blockchain nodes, etc., each with its own API, compliance requirements, and SLAs, leading to engineering timelines of several months. The accumulation of technical debt, slow deployment, and compounded compliance risks made the founders realize that fragmented infrastructure had become the core bottleneck in the payment industry's adoption of stablecoins, ultimately leading them to leave Shift4 and establish Cyclops in 2025.

Cyclops' core objective is to provide a one-stop stablecoin infrastructure for payment companies, allowing PSPs to offer related services to merchants without needing to build or maintain blockchain components themselves or become cryptocurrency companies.

One-stop Access

Cyclops achieves integration through low-code/no-code solutions and a single API that covers stablecoin and fiat currency settlement, payment receipt, disbursement, and fund management. Payment companies merely need to call a single interface, while Cyclops automatically handles cross-chain routing, liquidity scheduling, compliance checks, and fault tolerance processing in the background. According to Fortune, Cyclops' platform can shorten a payment company's onboarding time from several months or even years to just a few weeks.

Solana-Prioritized Settlement Network

Cyclops has chosen Solana as its preferred settlement network. Solana can handle thousands of transactions per second, has sub-second finality, and very low transaction fees. According to data from the Solana Foundation, the stablecoin ecosystem on Solana expanded from about $1.83 billion in early 2025 to $9.3 billion in the third quarter of 2025. The platform continues to integrate with other public chains like Ethereum to expand low-cost on-chain settlement channel options.

Compliance Framework

Co-founder David Johnson designed Cyclops' global licensing structure, covering over 100 licensed jurisdictions through dozens of partners. The company has initiated licensing processes in the U.S. and Europe, including obtaining money transmission licenses in various states and submitting a MiCA application in Austria. Chief Compliance Officer Dan Savitt's regulatory background further strengthens the company's compliance capabilities.

Function Customization for the Payment Industry

Unlike generic cryptocurrency infrastructure aimed at developers, Cyclops' functionality is specifically designed around the operational methods of payment processors, including settlement reconciliation, merchant onboarding workflows, and integration with existing POS devices and payment systems. The platform supports over 400 types of digital assets and operates across more than 150 countries.

Consumers swipe their cards as usual, with no change to the front-end process; at the end of the day, Cyclops converts the settlement funds into USDC stablecoins and directly disburses them to the merchant's wallet, eliminating the traditional 1-3 day settlement delay from banks and achieving rapid returns around the clock. Source:X

Project Progress: From Commercial Launch to Client Acquisition

Cyclops completed its $8 million seed round of financing in March 2026 and officially launched commercial operations.

On the client side, current core clients include Shift4 Payments and Mastercard, with both companies collaborating on stablecoin settlement products. Shift4 is also an investor in Cyclops' seed round, and its service base of over 300,000 merchants constitutes a potential customer base for Cyclops. Additionally, the platform has supported companies like Blade Helicopter Travel and Blue Origin in achieving stablecoin settlements around the clock.

In terms of market expansion, the company is currently prioritizing deepening its presence in the North American and European markets, leveraging existing compliance licenses to solidify its foundation in these regions; in the medium to long term, it plans to focus on cross-border trade payment corridors in Latin America and Asia Pacific.

Regarding operational data, since the commercial launch, the platform's transaction volume has seen a month-on-month growth of 350%. The platform is also continuously integrating with public chains like Ethereum and Solana to expand low-cost on-chain settlement channel options.

Competitive Landscape: Differentiated Positioning Focused on the Vertical Sector

Current participants in the B-end stablecoin infrastructure sector can be categorized into three main types, with clear differentiating characteristics for Cyclops:

• Comprehensive cryptocurrency financial infrastructure (e.g., ZeroHash, BVNK). Advantages: Broader product line, covering brokerage, custody, and exchange; weaknesses: Generic products that serve multiple clients across exchanges, asset management, and payments, lack in-depth customization for the payment industry, and high workload for integration and modification.
• Subsidiary B-end solutions from stablecoin issuers (e.g., Circle's B-end payment infrastructure product line Circle Payments). Advantages: Deep integration of native USDC; weaknesses: Reliance on a single stablecoin, limited support for other types of stablecoins, lacking neutrality.
• Cyclops' differentiated positioning. The entry point in the sector is extremely focused, serving only payment industry clients (acquirers, payment processors) without engaging in exchange business or developing C-end retail wallet services for general users; all product features are designed around payment acquisition and merchant settlement scenarios while integrating multiple stablecoin and on-chain service providers neutrally. On the weakness side, compared to established competitors like ZeroHash, Cyclops has a shorter commercial operating time and is still in the early stages of customer case accumulation, with its global licensing landscape still expanding.

Moreover, projects like Ubyx and Fnality, which focus on interbank large-value settlements, are distinctly different from Cyclops' retail merchant acquisition scenario; while Stripe and Visa are exploring stablecoin payments, their core business is at the merchant traffic side, which is at a different level from Cyclops' infrastructure layer positioning. The aforementioned projects bear no direct competitive relationship with Cyclops.

Overall, Cyclops is targeting a segmented niche market: existing B-end stablecoin infrastructure mostly caters to comprehensive institutions or end enterprises, lacking a complete solution suitable for the scaled operations of payment service providers serving a massive number of small and medium merchants.

Conclusion

Stablecoins are gradually penetrating from cryptocurrency-native scenarios into real-world cross-border settlements and daily fund clearing for merchants, while the digital transformation of payment institutions has generated a continuous demand for lightweight, compliant on-chain underlying tools. The Cyclops team originates from the cryptocurrency business segment of traditional payment giants, accurately capturing the market gap of existing infrastructure being challenging to adapt to the workflows of payment enterprises. They have chosen to vertically deepen the payment sector and avoid direct homogenized competition with comprehensive service providers.

At this stage, the project benefits from three advantages: capital support, industry resources from the founding team, and early benchmarking clients. However, it still faces multiple uncertainties: the ongoing fluctuations in stablecoin regulatory policies across various countries will directly influence the pace of license expansion; the customer acquisition cycle for B-end payment infrastructure is relatively long, and whether they can maintain rapid growth in transaction volume remains to be seen; and mature competitors in the sector continue to iterate payment scenario solutions, which may intensify market competition in the future. The key focus for medium to long-term development lies in whether they can continue to establish partnerships with more leading payment service providers, accomplish compliance layouts in key regions, and steadily build vertical scenario product barriers.

References:

Fortune: Cyclops raises $8 million... (2026/03/04)

Fortune: Exclusive: Cyclops raises $20 million... (2026/07/15)

Cyclops Official Website

Cyclops Official Blog: Meet The Founders

PR Newswire

Every Payment Company Wants Stablecoins. Almost None Can Ship Them