In 2018, when Alex Wilson co-founded The Giving Block, most charities still treated Bitcoin as a fad. He spent the next several years building infrastructure to help nonprofits accept crypto donations, sold the company to payment processor Shift4, and stayed inside to build their crypto products. Now he's spun out Cyclops, a stablecoin infrastructure company built specifically for payments companies.
On this episode of Bits to Bricks, Wilson walks host Amira Valliani through how the decentralized, end-the-Fed energy of 2018 has given way to more pragmatic and moderate conversations about basis points, settlement windows, and merchant treasury. His opinion is that this isn't a betrayal of the original vision, but instead it's where the real adoption is happening.
What stablecoin payments actually mean to Alex Wilson
When Wilson says “payments”, he’s talking about transactions between entities: B2B, B2C, or B2B2C. He's interested in merchant acceptance, settlement from a processor to a merchant, or merchants paying out their customers.
Daily coffee purchases aren't where Wilson sees true stablecoin payments emerging anytime soon, with the possible exception of the stablecoin debit cards that have surged in usage recently. The bar for in-person retail, in his view, is high. "It's really got to get to a sort of tap-to-pay type of user experience like Apple Pay," he said. "Until that's really the case, I don't think so."
Where Cyclops is finding traction is one step further down the transaction chain.
How merchant settlement works on Solana
The customer-side experience of paying with a card is fast. Settlement, the part where the merchant actually receives the money, is slower. Merchants get paid by ACH or wire at the end of each day, tied to banking hours, business days, and public holidays. Most wait two business days for funds to land, and many pre-fund regional accounts and hold idle balances to cover the gap.
Wilson's pitch is to swap that final leg for stablecoin settlement. Instead of waiting on the bank rail, the merchant opts to receive USDC or USDT, near-instantly, 24/7.
"The merchant comes to us and says, hey, I would love to get settled seven days a week. Well, that's really only possible with stablecoins." – Alex Wilson
The substitution looks small in the abstract, but it changes the things merchants actually track day to day.
| Category | Traditional ACH/wire settlement | Stablecoin settlement on Solana |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | T+2 | Under 24 hours, often near-instant |
| Hours | Banking days only, no weekends or holidays | 24/7/365 |
| Pre-funded accounts | Required across regions to cover settlement gaps | Not required |
| USD access in LATAM and Eastern Europe | Needs a US correspondent banking relationship | Direct, no correspondent bank |
| FX in emerging markets | Local currency conversion drag | Receive USD-denominated stablecoins directly |
The customer profile makes the case: Wilson isn't selling to corner restaurants. He's working through payments companies that serve global airlines and hotel chains operating across 50 to 100 countries. For those merchants, the headline benefit is freeing up the working capital that sits idle in pre-funded accounts. The second, FX, is one Wilson explained directly:
"They can actually even get better dollar liquidity by converting into stablecoins for the settlement option, then if they settle in the local currency first and then use traditional rails to convert to US dollars." – Alex Wilson
Regional reach matters. LATAM and Eastern Europe have historically been hard to serve because USD-backed settlement requires a US correspondent banking relationship that many merchants in those markets can't access. Stablecoin settlement removes that dependency. A merchant in São Paulo or Warsaw can receive dollar-denominated stablecoins directly, without routing through a US bank.
The same logic extends to payouts. Cyclops has worked with Global Blue on stablecoin tax refund payouts, the kind of cross-border use case that's painful to build with a stack of separate wallet, on-ramp, and compliance vendors.
Solana is where a lot of this is being built. It leads all chains in stablecoin transfer volume and shows the highest velocity of any chain, with sub-second finality and fees that stay predictable even when the network is under load. For acquirers running settlement at airline-and-hotel-chain volumes, that consistency matters as much as the speed. Merchants on the traditional-card path receive digital dollars in 24 hours or less, including weekends. The card networks haven't changed. The settlement layer underneath them is what's getting rebuilt.
Why stablecoin infrastructure is the long-term bet
According to Wilson, most large payments companies genuinely believe they have a real crypto strategy. They've made announcements and they've signed agreements with infrastructure vendors.
"It just never actually ends up happening or getting prioritized. It ends up being maybe harder than they expect, or taking longer than they expect." – Alex Wilson
Some of that is investor pressure asking what they're doing on stablecoins. Some is the fact that AI has consumed the innovation roadmap at most large companies. Wilson's response is to remove the engineering lift entirely. "Something like stablecoin settlement, they could actually do a pilot with us without doing a single line of new code." Visa is the contrast he points to: stablecoins on earnings calls, investments in the space, product shipping.
The bet underneath that positioning is that the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure won't sell breadth across eight to ten verticals the way Bridge, BVNK, and ZeroHash did. It will pick a vertical and own it.
"I think someone's going to do that for banks. Someone's going to do that for brokerages. Someone will do that for restaurants, for airlines, and they'll go really, really deep." – Alex Wilson
That's the same logic Wilson uses to explain what's actually stuck in crypto so far. "Stablecoins have just kind of stolen the show," he said. NFTs, memecoins, most of DeFi beyond basic borrowing, all phases that came and went. What lasted was the boring stuff. "The boring businesses are what actually get adoption and what actually make money."
His ten-year prediction follows the same logic: "Hopefully ten years from now, we're not even using the word crypto and stablecoins very much because it's just how things are working behind the scenes and no one even notices it."
This article draws from Amira Valliani's conversation with Alex Wilson, Co-founder and CEO of Cyclops. For the full discussion, listen to the complete episode of Bits to Bricks.
