The Startup Raising $8 Million to Make Stablecoin Payments the Global Standard for Payroll

Blade is a service that exists at the exact intersection of urban congestion and disposable income. Somewhere in New York City, a customer uses Blade to book a helicopter ride to JFK Airport. The money doesn’t go through a traditional bank wire or have to wait for business hours to clear when that booking settles. It uses infrastructure created by a 20-person startup named Cyclops to move through stablecoins nearly instantly. On the other side of the stablecoin economy, an Indian podcast producer discovers that Zencastr has compensated them for their work when they launch an app. In a matter of seconds, the dollars left a U.S. business account, changed into a stablecoin, traveled across borders, and landed in local currency. That was made possible by a startup named Latitude.
These two minor but illuminating data points point to what appears to be a structural change in the way money moves around the world: stablecoin networks that function around the clock, without banking hours, and without the delays that have plagued multinational corporations for decades, rather than the traditional banking rails most people picture when they think of international transfers. The fact that two distinct startups raised $8 million in the same month and are constructing distinct components of this infrastructure indicates where the momentum is.
Castle Island Ventures, F-Prime, and Shift4 Payments contributed to Cyclops’ funding round. The latter is both an investor and a client, which is the kind of arrangement that either reflects strong conviction or a complex set of incentives, possibly both. Alex Wilson, Pat Duffy, and David Johnson, the startup’s co-founders, approached the concept fairly openly. They had all collaborated at Shift4, where expanding the company’s cryptocurrency offerings necessitated piecing together services from several vendors, including ZeroHash, Bridge, and BVNK, each of whom handled a distinct piece of the puzzle. They seem to have been persuaded to create the unified alternative by the experience of handling that fragmentation. So they did. Wilson clarified that the name Cyclops originated from a shared love of Greek mythology as well as the desire to be a single eye on the entire landscape rather than a collection of disparate parts, which feels surprisingly human for a fintech startup.

Wilson is not starting his own business. In order to assist charities in accepting cryptocurrency donations, he and Duffy founded The Giving Block in 2018. Although it was not a clear business at the time, it gained significant traction and was eventually purchased by Shift4 in 2022. The founders were able to observe how the plumbing of stablecoin adoption is actually built at scale during their multi-year window inside a major payments company after that exit, which also provided them with a financial foundation. The result of that observation period is Cyclops. Businesses already utilizing the system through Shift4 include Jeff Bezos’ commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin. In other words, the client list consists of businesses that depend on accuracy and responsibility rather than tenacious cryptocurrency startups experimenting with digital assets.
A different wager on the same underlying trend is called latitude. Its founders, Cyril Mathew, Vivek Morzaria, and Brian Wrightson, have backgrounds in Stripe, Coinbase, Uber, and Meta, indicating that they are knowledgeable about both the infrastructure and consumer aspects of digital payments. Global Payouts, their main product, enables American companies to pay people in over 50 countries. No one using the product can see the underlying cryptocurrency mechanics as the money enters as US dollars, moves via stablecoin rails, and ends up in the recipient’s local currency. The best illustration of who this benefits is Zencastr, a podcasting platform that must pay creators in India and other countries without having to wait for international wire transfers to clear or absorb the costs associated with traditional cross-border payments. The round concluded with support from NEA, Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase, Paxos, and the Solana Foundation. This roster, which includes both traditional venture capital firms and crypto-native organizations, is indicative of the convergence of the two worlds.
Observing these two businesses in action gives me the impression that the story of stablecoin infrastructure has subtly transitioned from theory to reality. SWIFT and legacy foreign exchange clearing systems, which have been moving money around the world for decades and are ingrained in how companies view international payments, are the rivals mentioned by both startups. It’s a big, well-established incumbent to overthrow. However, as actual transaction data begins to accumulate, it becomes more difficult to reject the claim that stablecoins provide features like instant settlement, 24-hour availability, and significantly lower fees for cross-border transfers that legacy systems structurally cannot. According to Andreessen Horowitz’s State of Crypto report, stablecoins handled $46 trillion in transactions in the previous year. That figure isn’t speculative. It’s large-scale infrastructure.
The speed at which traditional payment companies will adopt stablecoins to the extent that Cyclops is aiming for is still unknown. Wilson intends to collaborate with Fiserv, Adyen, and Global Payments, three massive companies whose decision-making processes are influenced by institutional caution, legacy systems, and compliance requirements. It takes more time to persuade them to embrace new rails, even ones that are compelling, than it does to raise a seed round and sign a few early clients. However, it appears that both of these startups and the larger stablecoin ecosystem are headed in the same direction. Now, the question is how quickly the infrastructure is developed and how soon the companies that have been putting up with SWIFT’s restrictions decide they’ve had enough.