Meet The Founders
Meet the people building the stablecoin infrastructure that payments companies have been waiting for.
Cyclops wasn't built by outsiders looking in. It was built by three people who spent years doing the hard work of bringing crypto and stablecoin capabilities to one of the world's largest payment companies — and decided the industry needed something better than what existed.
Alex Wilson, Co-Founder & Co-CEO
Alex Wilson started his career in management consulting before co-founding The Giving Block with Pat Duffy in 2018. The Giving Block became the leading nonprofit crypto fundraising platform, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for charities worldwide before being acquired by Shift4 in 2022.
At Shift4, Alex was named Head of Crypto, spending nearly four years leading the product and commercial teams' crypto expansion. Under his leadership, Shift4 built a suite of stablecoin and crypto products that processed billions of dollars for some of the world's biggest brands including Blade, TAO Group and Blue Origin.
Alex has been recognized as Forbes 30 Under 30 for Social Impact and has been featured in Forbes, Fortune, CNBC and Bloomberg. He advises the Wake Forest Business School on innovative technologies and sits on the board of Junior Achievement of Greater Miami.
Pat Duffy, Co-Founder & Co-CEO
Pat Duffy is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cyclops, the stablecoin infrastructure platform powering the payments industry. Pat is a serial entrepreneur and payments disruptor, who has dedicated his career to accelerating the adoption of cutting edge technologies.
Pat got his start as a category creator as Co-Founder of The Giving Block, acquired by payments giant Shift4 in 2022, where he and co-founder Alex Wilson created an entirely new fundraising category called "Crypto Philanthropy." Under Pat's leadership, The Giving Block built the leading crypto acceptance solutions for charities, universities and religious organizations. Turning crypto into the fastest growing donation trend in the nonprofit sector, Pat and team modernized the industry and raised hundreds of millions of dollars for nonprofits in the process.
Following the acquisition, Pat was named Head of Nonprofit for the payments titan. Pat led the charge as Shift4 stormed into the nonprofit sector with lower fees and more complete payments offerings, bolstered by The Giving Block's industry-leading crypto, stock and DAF solutions.
Pat has received the honors of Forbes 30 Under 30, The Kennedy Center's Next 50, and CoinDesk's 100 Most Influential People in Crypto. He has been featured in Fortune, Time Magazine, Newsweek, U.S. News, Associated Press, Coindesk, and CNBC, to name a few.
David Johnson, Co-Founder & President
David Johnson brings a rare combination of legal precision and startup execution to Cyclops. He spent over a decade advising Fortune 100 companies on high-stakes technology deals at Pillsbury before pivoting to the startup world, co-founding BlockShop in 2018 — Washington DC's first crypto and blockchain startup incubator, and the space where The Giving Block was born.
David joined The Giving Block as a strategic advisor and general counsel, and following the Shift4 acquisition, worked across legal, product and commercial for Shift4's crypto vertical. He played a pivotal role in developing the stablecoin settlement and payout solutions that processed billions in crypto and stablecoin volume for merchants including Blade, TAO Group and Blue Origin. He and Alex also created Shift4's Pay with Crypto product, enabling crypto payments across more point-of-sale devices than ever before.
Why They Built Cyclops
After years of building crypto products inside one of the world's largest payment companies, the team saw the same problem everywhere they looked: the infrastructure available to payments companies wasn't built for payments companies. Generalist platforms required payments teams to adapt their workflows to tools designed for banks, exchanges or direct-to-merchant use cases.
Cyclops was built to fix that — purpose-built crypto and stablecoin infrastructure for PSPs, merchant acquirers and processors, by people who built it the hard way first.
