A few years ago, Alex Wilson and his team were trying to bring crypto features into a large payments company. What sounded simple quickly turned into a messy build: multiple vendors, complex integrations, and engineering teams working across different systems just to launch a few digital asset features.
“It was so much harder than it needed to be,” Wilson commented. “We shouldn’t have needed multiple vendors and dedicated engineering and product teams to bring those products to market.”
Now he and his cofounders think they have a better answer.
Cyclops, a startup founded by Wilson alongside Pat Duffy and David Johnson, just raised $8 million in strategic funding from Castle Island Ventures, F-Prime, and payments giant Shift4. Their idea is simple: build a platform that allows payments companies to offer crypto and stablecoin services without having to become crypto companies themselves.
The founders have built together before. Prior to Cyclops, they launched The Giving Block, a platform that helped nonprofits accept cryptocurrency donations before it was acquired by Shift4. After the acquisition, the team spent several years inside the payments giant building out crypto and stablecoin products.
That experience revealed a clear gap.
Payments companies increasingly want to offer digital asset features such as crypto payments or stablecoin settlement. But actually launching those tools often requires patching together infrastructure from multiple vendors.
Cyclops aims to collapse that complexity into one platform.
“Cyclops is the first platform where everything comes out of the box ready for a payments company,” Wilson said.
The platform allows payment service providers to enable crypto payments, stablecoin settlement, and digital asset payouts without building or maintaining blockchain infrastructure themselves.
The founders say the idea came directly from the problems they experienced firsthand.
“This is not just a story we heard. This was our story,” Duffy wrote in a launch post about the company.
According to Duffy, the industry is already eager to move into stablecoins.
“Customers are asking for it, leadership is ready and the underlying technology is proven,” he wrote. “And yet, very little is getting done.”
In an interview with Refresh Miami, Wilson shared that our city has had a major impact on his trajectory as an entrepreneur.
“I moved to Miami over 4 years ago when I was still running The Giving Block,” he said. “We moved the HQ of The Giving Block to Miami and now started Cyclops from Miami because of the central role Miami plays in finance and crypto.”
Wilson continued: “There is no better place to start and grow a company. The people moving to this city are unmatched. The energy is incredible. It makes you want to build. I can’t imagine building a company anywhere else.”
Meanwhile, investors say the team’s experience gives them an advantage.
“The Cyclops team spent years building stablecoins and crypto products inside of a large company,” said Sean Judge, General Partner at Castle Island Ventures. “Their products are unique because they had to do it the hard way. No one knows the pain points better than they do.”
Cyclops is launching its platform commercially this week and is already serving Shift4 as a customer. But the company plans to move carefully as it expands to new partners.
For Duffy, the mission is partly about ending what he sees as unnecessary technical friction across the industry.
“Adding stablecoin settlement options for merchants shouldn’t feel like the Manhattan Project,” he wrote.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- How is crypto philanthropy evolving? The Giving Block sheds light on that
- Miami philanthropy goes web3 with The Giving Block’s new fund for crypto donations
- Milo tops $100 million in crypto mortgages as it doubles down on Bitcoin-backed home loans
- This South Florida fintech is turning crypto’s chaos into something institutions can actually use
- This trader who walked away from AI to build a crypto giant just raised $68M
