Stablecoin payments startup Cyclops raises $8 million from Castle Island Ventures, F-Prime and Shift4

Cyclops, a stablecoin payments startup, has raised a strategic investment of $8 million, the company said Wednesday.

Castle Island Ventures, F-Prime, and Shift4 Payments participated in the round, according to a statement.

Cyclops' founders previously created The Giving Block, a crypto-based solution for donating to nonprofits. They later sold the business to Shift4 and then spent three years working on that company's stablecoin and crypto solutions, Cyclops said.

"Using a patchwork of existing solutions, we built products for pay-with-crypto, stablecoin settlement and stablecoin payouts at Shift4," Cyclops co-founder Alex Wilson said. "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."

Stablecoins, crypto tokens typically pegged to the U.S. dollar, are slowly becoming a larger part of payments and settlements globally. Promising faster and cheaper settlement, older financial institutions and newer fintechs alike are taking a keen interest in developing blockchain-based payment solutions or issuing their own stablecoin.

Cyclops plans to help payments companies to offer "stablecoin settlement, crypto payments and digital asset capabilities to merchants without building or maintaining blockchain infrastructure," the company said.

"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," Castle Island Ventures General Partner Sean Judge said.