This week, Cyclops announced an $8 million strategic investment from Castle Island Ventures, F-Prime and Shift4 Payments to build the stablecoin and crypto platform exclusively for the payments industry. Created by repeat founders Pat Duffy, Alex Wilson and David Johnson, the new platform enables payment service providers (PSPs) to offer crypto and stablecoin capabilities through a single partner, replacing the fragmented multi-vendor approach that has prevented widespread adoption of digital assets across the payments industry.
The founders are known for building purpose-built crypto platforms. Prior to Cyclops, they created The Giving Block, the leading crypto donations solution for nonprofits. After selling the business to Shift4, they spent the last three years building out Shift4’s stablecoin and crypto solutions. Dissatisfaction with the incumbents led them to found Cyclops, running their same purpose-built playbook but, this time, for payments companies.
“Using a patchwork of existing solutions, we built products for pay-with-crypto, stablecoin settlement and stablecoin payouts at Shift4,” said Wilson. “It was so much harder than it needed to be. We shouldn’t have needed multiple vendors and dedicated engineering and product teams to bring those products to market. Cyclops is the first platform where everything comes out of the box ready for a payments company.”
The platform enables payments companies to offer stablecoin settlement, crypto payments and digital asset capabilities to merchants without building or maintaining blockchain infrastructure. By focusing on one industry, the company tailors their onboarding, compliance and technical offerings to form-fit traditional and agentic payments use cases. By eliminating the need for intensive integrations across multiple partners, Cyclops aims to accelerate stablecoin adoption in the payments industry.
“Payments companies see the potential for crypto and stablecoin products. Merchants are asking for them. But they’ve been prohibitively difficult and expensive to bring to market. We like Cyclops because we don’t think a payments company should need to become a crypto company just to offer these products to their customers,” said Luke Thomas, chief strategy officer at Shift4.
MiCA and GENIUS have created the legal clarity necessary for payments companies to leverage their distribution to capitalize on the stablecoin boom. Stablecoins help PSPs move money more quickly, grow their margins and build stickier relationships with merchants.
“The Cyclops team spent years building stablecoins and crypto products inside of a large company. Their products are unique because they had to do it the hard way. No one knows the pain points better than they do,” said Sean Judge, general partner at Castle Island Ventures.
