Ep. 113 - Cyclops’ Series A and Why Payments Companies Keep Getting Stablecoins Wrong

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

We are creating a system of coordination and trust. Our message to the world is, don't trust your agent, trust your system. Agents can search, agents can recommend, make a payment, they can act. But acting is not doing real business. Doing business is more than that. It's about offers, it's about orders, agreements, payment and settlements. Human approvals are critical. Humans in the loop is a problem. I think this model simply does not scale. If we ask humans to oversee a reaction that agents take, there is no agenic economy. Agents create opportunity for small businesses to build those kinds of relationships on the fly with agents that they trust, that they control to generate revenue and grow. With transaction costs going down to zero, there is real opportunity for agents to do business in ways that was not imaginable before.

Sarah Stapp (0:55)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed. I'm Sarah Stapp, joined by my co-host Kara Parkey.

Kara Parkey (0:59)

Today we are joined by Alex Wilson, the co-founder, co-CEO of Cyclops, the stablecoin and crypto infrastructure platform built exclusively for payments companies. Thanks for joining us.

Alex Wilson (1:09)

Yeah. Thanks for having me today, guys.

Sarah Stapp (1:11)

Really appreciate you joining us, Alex. You're joining us with some news, very exciting news. But just before we get into the big announcement, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background?

Alex Wilson (1:19)

Yeah. Happy to.

I've been working in payments for a long time now. Started my first payments and crypto business actually all the way back in 2018 So that business was called The Giving Block. We helped charities accept crypto donations, stable coin donations and just generally help them be successful in fundraising. That was pretty tough in the beginning. 2018, not a lot of charities were convinced that Bitcoin was going to be sticking around and to them it was still just a buzzword. So luckily we were very stubborn and stuck with it. Eventually that really took off and we ended up working with a lot of the biggest charities around the world. We sold that business then to Shift4 in 2021, about four years ago.

When we got acquired by Shift4, I became the head of crypto and stable coins there, built out a lot of different things and happy to get into the details of that later and then just about a year ago, we started Cyclops and I'm one of the three co-founders.

Kara Parkey (2:15)

Your other co-founders, one of them worked with you at The Giving Block, right?

Alex Wilson (2:19)

Yeah. It's actually a great backstory how it all came together. So Pat and I co-founded The Giving Block together. We'd actually gone to college together. Then we both moved to Washington, DC after college, stayed in touch, hung out a lot on the weekends.

We always say I was the crypto guy and he was a non-profit guy. So we brought those two things together to start The Giving Block. The funniest part of it all is actually that Pat was the friend in our group, talking people out of crypto at the time, literally saying Bitcoin is a scam, don't invest, stay away kind of thing. I would just always give him a hard time about it and send him things about crypto and stable coins and eventually got him to come around.

Kara Parkey (3:00)

He's going to say what was it that convinced him to then start a business.

Alex Wilson (3:03)

Yeah, I mean, he says reading the Bitcoin white paper for the first time is what really had that aha moment for him. And then we both always been pretty entrepreneurial.

I was a management consultant at the time, but we always had some sort of different side hustle and just trying to make a little extra cash somehow. And so we've just like overdrinks basically, eventually we're like, what could we do in crypto that we might be uniquely well positioned to do? What problem could we solve? And he was like, why don't we help charities accept crypto? And he was working in a non-profit at the time.

Kara Parkey (3:31)

That's awesome. That's a really cool story. So it's the two of you and then one other? Yep.

Alex Wilson (3:35)

And so David Johnson, he's the third co-founder. His story also very interesting. We met him in Washington, DC as well. He was a full-time lawyer at the time at a law firm called Pillsbury.

In his spare time, he had set up a co-working and incubator focused on blockchain technology. And he was also looking for a way to get into the crypto space more. And we were the first startup to work out of that co-working space.