Cyclops in Vienna: Company Offsite Recap
A look inside the Cyclops team's full week in Vienna
The Cyclops team recently came together in Vienna for a global strategic meetup and to celebrate the official opening of our European headquarters. Miami and Vienna will serve as our two hubs, while the company operates as a global, remote-first company.
Getting the team together in one place is something we don't take for granted, so we made the most of it. All the startup classics – from whiteboards and walls littered with sticky notes, to team dinners, karaoke and dancing. We were also lucky enough to overlap our meetup with our friends at Shift4 to advance key initiatives together.
Opening the Vienna office was a strategic decision for Cyclops. The innovation-minded FMA continued to live up to their reputation, carving out plenty of time to meet with us to advance our licensing journey. Vienna is quickly becoming a crypto hub due to the hardworking team there. We evaluated every European country and Austria came out on top for nearly every metric we evaluated when choosing our European hub.
The week was packed with strategy sessions, compliance training and the kind of work that's best done in person. Though we made some time for schnitzel and exploring as well.
The Office Opening Party
We opened our doors to the payments and crypto community for an evening to officially mark the launch of our European headquarters. Headed up by Jonas Jünger, our Vienna entity will be our homebase for EU compliance and initiatives. The turnout was amazing — professionals from across the payments ecosystem, Vienna's crypto and fintech community, partners and friends all came together to celebrate the moment with us. The energy on our rooftop reminded us how excited and ready the payments industry is for stablecoin adoption. To everyone who came out, thank you!
What We Worked On
Strategy
We spent meaningful time as a team fine-tuning product roadmaps, prioritizing the payments industry's biggest problems and how to continue building the industry's leading platform. As always, the ideas and clarity that emerged from our in-person sessions reminded us of how grateful we are to have assembled such a gifted team. We found even more ways to optimize Cyclops operations and product development using AI, and unpacked key ways to build and brace for the inevitable change that will come with the rise of agentic commerce. We got a lot done and left Vienna more aligned than ever. The payments industry is moving fast and relentless pursuit of first principles prioritization is the only way to ensure we're moving with it.
Client Experience
We spent a lot of time throughout the week thinking about our clients and what they need at every stage of working with Cyclops. From engineering to business development and operations, every area of the company came together to look at the experience we're delivering and where we can make it stronger. We took our learnings from working with different partners (good and bad), and found dozens of ways to be best-in-class across the lifecycle.
At Cyclops, we believe the best infrastructure is built in close partnership with the people using it. That means continuously asking for feedback, actually listening to it and building what we hear back into every product and process decision. This week gave us the space to do that thinking as a full team, so that every function is aligned around the same goal: making it as easy as possible for our clients to build and grow with us.
Compliance
One of the highlights of the week was a full-team compliance workshop that brought together perspectives from both our US and European operations. At Cyclops, compliance isn't something that lives in one department — it's woven into every decision we make and product we build. With our US Chief Compliance Officer Dan Savitt and our European compliance lead Jonas Jünger working in tandem, the workshop reinforced that our approach to compliance is truly global and consistent across every market we operate in. Having the whole team aligned around that shared mindset is something we're proud of and something we want our clients to feel every time they work with us.
Team
Honestly, the best part of the week was being together with our people. Getting to spend time with everyone across different time zones, roles and backgrounds left us impressed and inspired. The ambition, intelligence, kindness and genuine excitement everyone brought to Vienna was special. We are also always proud of the fact that we surround ourselves with high character individuals who care so deeply about doing right by others. It shows in the way they treat one another, as well as their passion for helping the clients we serve.
What became clear is that the culture we're building at Cyclops isn't just something that exists internally. It shows up in how we work with our partners and clients. Everyone on the team wants to win this market via providing more value rather than cutting corners. People want to build with teams they trust, respect and enjoy working with. That's what we're committed to being. We came back more motivated than ever, more connected as a team and more excited about what's ahead. The best is yet to come.
What's Next
There's a lot ahead for Cyclops and even more to come from Vienna. If you're a payments company exploring what stablecoin and crypto infrastructure looks like for your business, we'd love to talk.
