What We've Learned Building Stablecoin Solutions for Nearly a Decade

This year marks eight years since our team started building in this space, from our founders to our devs and everything in between. Eight years of learning the ins and outs of crypto, stablecoins and payments from the inside, across a few very different chapters that all led here.

Where it started: The Giving Block

In 2018, Alex Wilson and Pat Duffy started The Giving Block, a platform that made it possible for nonprofits to accept crypto and stablecoin donations. At the time, most of the industry was still debating whether crypto was a legitimate asset class at all, let alone a practical tool for everyday organizations. Building for nonprofits meant learning the regulatory, compliance and operational realities of moving digital assets in and out of an entirely traditional financial system, for organizations that had zero tolerance for complexity or risk.

That work built the foundation for everything that came next, and in 2022, The Giving Block was acquired by Shift4.

Learning payments from inside Shift4

At Shift4, Pat and Alex, now joined by David Johnson, spent four years building out stablecoin capabilities at the scale of a major public payments company. This is where crypto and stablecoin expertise turned into real payments expertise. They already understood the crypto and stablecoin side from The Giving Block, now they had to learn the payments side too: settlement timing, merchant onboarding, chargeback and dispute flows, licensing across jurisdictions and the compliance demands that come with processing billions in volume for a public company.

Stablecoin and crypto knowledge without payments context doesn't hold up at that scale, and payments knowledge without crypto depth can’t build a sustainable product.

Building those products also exposed a gap, one that the team ran into repeatedly and from every angle. There was no single platform built to handle stablecoins for a payments company end to end. Instead, the team had to stitch together a patchwork of point solutions, one vendor for custody, another for wallet linking, another for settlement, another for KYC, another for payouts, each covering a narrow slice of the stack and none of them talking to each other cleanly. Every new corridor or product meant renegotiating that patchwork from scratch. What should have been a single technical decision kept turning into a vendor management problem, and that gap between what payments companies needed and what the market actually offered is what stuck with all three of them.

Cyclops

That frustration is what led Alex, Pat and David to start Cyclops. Having spent years building crypto products from scratch and then building payments products at scale inside one of the world's largest processors, they understood exactly where the gaps were and what it actually takes for a payments company to bring stablecoins to market. Not a generic crypto platform retrofitted for payments, but infrastructure built from the ground up for how they actually operate. Every product decision, compliance framework, hiring decision and investor reflects that combined background.

That is what eight plus years of building nonstop makes possible. We know where the friction lives because our team has spent nearly a decade working through it themselves — and built Cyclops specifically so payments companies don’t have to.

Looking forward: the next eight years

In 2018, pitching crypto and stablecoins was painful. Our founders were building some of the first crypto and stablecoin payments products to go mainstream, through The Giving Block and Shift4. They were on the cutting edge, but the industry was only beginning to understand the potential.

The last decade has been a story of industries viewing digital assets as, at worst, a distracting fad and, at best, a niche bet. Today, the payments industry recognizes that stablecoin rails are a necessary part of optimizing payments rails. Moving money faster and cheaper, avoiding liquidity traps, escaping the pain of FX rate hikes. These stablecoin value propositions scale with the size and global nature of the payments companies who pursue them.

We have evolved from a story about “pay with crypto” stickers on a POS, to a story about billions of dollars in savings and net revenue delivered straight to the bottom line of the leading payments platforms.

Cyclops was built to meet the demands of this global opportunity. As payments companies are tackling bigger picture use cases, our eight years in crypto and payments have led us to build the infrastructure to meet that moment.

There are a million stablecoin companies. Many good at something, none good at everything. We are erasing the geographic and technical limitations that have turned big dreams into narrow realities. No more getting stuck offering “pay with crypto” in a single geographic corridor. No more getting stuck with a clunky and limited solution. Orchestrate across all the best parts — all through a single API. This is the Cyclops vision that we have brought to life for the leaders in payments.

Few teams have lived both the stablecoin infrastructure side and the payments side. We have been stablecoin platform builders, and we have been payments executives navigating the maze of vendors. We have seen around the corners, we have lived through overpromises that result in underdelivery. This informs not only the global platform partners we choose to integrate, but the seamless integration process we provide to our payments clients. We lived through the pain so you don’t have to.

Thank you to everyone who has trusted us along the way. And here’s to the next eight years building the stablecoin backbone of global payments at Cyclops!