How America Is Exporting Its $40 Trillion Debt

Summary

• Alex says stablecoins can help export the U.S. debt burden while extending dollar demand. Tommy cites roughly $40 trillion in debt; Alex says more stablecoin supply means more Treasury purchases by issuers, which could restrain yields while dollarizing other economies. His caveat matters: debt is “still going to be an issue”; this buys time.
• The main commercial opportunity is B2B money movement, with established payment processors positioned to capture more margin. Alex says 80–90% of Cyclops’ work concerns B2B flows, where faster settlement and cheaper currency conversion matter more than replacing consumers’ credit cards. Processors retain merchant distribution and can “cut out their middlemen,” potentially capturing economics previously earned by banking partners or networks.
• Cyclops turns a multi-provider stablecoin build into one integration for payments companies. Four years building for Shift4’s merchant base exposed the burden of coordinating five to 10 providers, sometimes a much larger stack. Cyclops offers “one relationship with us, one onboarding, one integration,” covering merchant settlement, checkout acceptance and payouts without requiring customers to assemble a crypto engineering team.
• The Giving Block’s advantage came from specializing where Coinbase Commerce and BitPay stayed generic. Alex estimates it now works with 70–80% of the world’s 100 largest nonprofits. A donation button “isn’t enough”: tax receipts, reporting and teaching fundraisers how to approach crypto donors made the product specific to the market.
• The March 1, 2022 sale to Shift4 was an expansion decision built around founder control. The Giving Block had raised $1.5 million at a $10.5 million valuation and was already profitable. Shift4 offered both nonprofit distribution opportunities and a broader crypto mandate; Alex wanted a buyer supporting “the next 10x growth of the company.”
• Cyclops expects more than 10 payments-company customers by year-end, against an initial target of three. It emerged from stealth in March and brought forward its Series A to July as interest accelerated. Alex’s ideal prospect has already spent a year or two struggling with infrastructure integration: “Guys, rip it up. Start over. We’ll get you live way faster.”
• Alex wants “a five or 10 billion dollar exit at least,” with an IPO still among the options. He expects substantial exit optionality within three to five years, but says the first successful sale is an “accelerant,” allowing the founders to take bigger swings. His hypothetical after a $10 billion sale: “Next company better be 100 billion.”

Deep dive

1. Small businesses taught Alex to sell a complete solution

• Alex’s starting point was blunt: “I always really wanted to make a lot of money,” partly to help his parents. Their encouragement made entrepreneurship feel available: seeing someone like Elon Musk on television meant “there’s no reason that can’t be you in 20 years.”

• His high-school businesses included domain trading and selling neighbors’ unused goods on eBay or Craigslist for a 20% commission. At his peak, he sold hundreds of domains a week, registering them for $78 each and often selling them for $20 or $30; volume was the model. For the resale service, he collected items, photographed and listed them, shipped them, collected payment through PayPal and delivered a check. “I’ll handle everything” was the proposition; older customers’ difficulty using the internet created the opening.

• At Wake Forest, Alex knew he wanted to go through business school; after college, he took a management consulting job for broad exposure to industries, problem-solving and potential collaborators. He enjoyed and learned from it, but nights and weekends remained dedicated to finding the business idea. Trading through the 2017 ICO cycle brought crypto into that search; the question was “what and when” to build.

2. The Giving Block won by designing only for nonprofits

• The idea emerged from conversations with Pat, a college friend working at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Pat initially mocked crypto; reading the Bitcoin white paper was his turning point. Their 2017 thesis combined growing crypto ownership with a nonprofit market larger than investors assumed and slow to adopt technology. Generic payment tools struggled with nonprofit onboarding and omitted essentials such as donation tax receipts.

• Starting in 2018’s bear market, they bootstrapped because investors dismissed the nonprofit opportunity. They kept their day jobs while initially building The Giving Block on nights and weekends, then shifted to part-time before going full-time. They became profitable before raising; Kyle Samani of Multicoin was an early backer who engaged with the market-size question. The jump to full-time came in spring 2020, as COVID panic and falling crypto prices made quitting especially risky. The exchange underscores the “layered risk” of asking people to donate what remained; Alex says they were stubborn enough to believe crypto would come back and be bigger than ever.

• The first roughly 50 clients were already accepting crypto through inadequate solutions. The Pineapple Fund supplied a research opportunity: an anonymous donor or group distributed approximately $50 million across 50 nonprofits, many receiving Bitcoin for the first time. Alex’s team interviewed recipients scrambling to open accounts, receive donations and sell volatile assets. They did not process those original gifts; they learned from the operational mess.

• Specialization extended from reporting and receipts to teaching fundraisers how to address crypto Twitter: “Please write Bitcoin as one word.” Alex estimates The Giving Block now works with 70–80% of the world’s 100 largest nonprofits, including organizations such as Save the Children and United Way. The competitive answer to Coinbase Commerce and BitPay was narrower scope: “We’re going to build it just for them.”

3. Shift4 bought a nonprofit channel and crypto capability

• The Giving Block raised $1.5 million at a $10.5 million valuation around late 2020 and early 2021, then sold on March 1, 2022, with much of the funding unspent. A sale was not the plan: strategic-investment conversations produced acquisition interest. After several approaches, the founders hired a banker and ran a process; that banker introduced Shift4.

• Incoming buyers initially fell into crypto exchanges and nonprofit fundraising platforms. Both seemed to restrict future growth to someone else’s existing customer base. Shift4’s proposition was “two for one”: enter major nonprofits and cross-sell traditional payments, while acquiring a team capable of building crypto products for merchants far beyond the nonprofit sector.

• Tommy highlights that the founders appeared focused on continued growth rather than simply maximizing the sale price. Alex agrees: it felt early to sell, and they wanted help achieving “the next 10x growth of the company.” Remaining hands-on and in control was explicit; not every buyer accepted that. Shift4’s founder-led culture and acquisition experience gave them confidence.

4. Ownership became a management practice and a hiring filter

• Alex’s principal lesson from Shift4 founder Jared was disciplined attention to what the business does well and “what actually makes money.” He describes an Elon/SpaceX-style emphasis on “extreme ownership, extreme accountability,” direct communication and performance. That appealed to founders worried about bureaucracy inside a larger company.

• The concrete example was support requests: Jared might not answer them personally, but he read them and understood recurring problems. Alex admired his ability to know what was happening across departments without micromanaging. The intervention was a question—“Why are we doing this a certain way?”—that required someone to explain the underlying decision.

• Cyclops now makes those expectations explicit before hiring. Every candidate interviews with a co-founder, and the aim includes “scare away the wrong people.” Job descriptions warn against expecting a corporate nine-to-five role. Alex looks for candidates who proactively demonstrate ownership and enjoyment of startup work; someone resentful about an occasional late call fails that cultural test.

• Complementary responsibilities help the founders operate together. Pat handles creative direction, marketing and vision; Alex concentrates on product, partnerships and daily operations. David, a lawyer they met through his D.C. blockchain incubator, owns compliance, legal and regulatory work. His progression from adviser to their lawyer to Shift4 colleague made him a natural partner in the next business.

5. Cyclops replaces an infrastructure project with one integration

• The founders stayed at Shift4 for roughly four years after the acquisition. Alex focused largely on stablecoin solutions for its then-200,000 merchants: settlement, payments, payouts and treasury applications. Repeated frustration with assembling providers eventually became the founding insight. “We need to stop complaining and just do this,” he recalls; they had lived the customer’s problem themselves.

• A typical implementation required five to 10 providers, with the broader stack potentially running to dozens. Regional on/off-ramps, primary and backup wallets, transaction monitoring, travel-rule requirements and other compliance components each introduced onboarding, contracts and maintenance. Providers’ global coverage often disappointed. The engineering challenge was keeping the collection working as an enterprise product.

• The Giving Block’s approach carried over: focus exclusively on payments companies and make the offering specific enough to cover their needs together. Cyclops promises “one relationship with us, one onboarding, one integration,” with products ready to white-label. The pitch is that a payments company does not need to become a crypto company or hire 20 crypto engineers.

• Merchant settlement in stablecoins is the leading use case. Checkout acceptance of crypto and stablecoins comes next, alongside payouts to merchants’ customers or workers. Alex’s illustrations include Uber- or DoorDash-style platforms, payroll and contracting businesses, and casinos paying winnings. Shift4 became both an investor and an anchor customer, rather than simply the founders’ former employer.

6. Global B2B flows matter more than replacing credit cards

• Blue Origin provides the memorable consumer example: customers can pay for a space ticket through Cyclops using crypto or stablecoins. Alex says prices are not publicly disclosed but run into millions. Such purchases often involve non-Americans owing dollar-denominated invoices without dollar bank accounts. International wires can cost 2–5% with poor banking arrangements; stablecoins offer an alternative to slow, opaque conversion and transfer processes.

• Tommy asks how much money cheaper rails ultimately return to consumers and businesses. Alex’s honest answer is that it is “really hard to say,” because the recipient of the savings varies. He rejects broad assumptions that payments companies disappear: they own customer distribution. Instead, they can remove banking or network intermediaries and sometimes earn better margins on stablecoin transactions.

• Tommy’s instinct is that card companies lose their fees. Alex’s pushback: “Call it 80, 90% of what we’re doing is really B2B flows.” Consumers still value points, lounge access and cash back. He does not expect that behavior to change very soon; the immediate opportunity lies elsewhere.

• Agent commerce influences everything Cyclops builds, although current activity remains relatively small. Alex expects it to grow each year. Implementation includes helping payments companies make outdated merchant checkouts usable by agents—effectively auditing them for AI readiness. He explicitly avoids assuming every agent will use stablecoins: future payment flows will mix fiat and crypto.

7. Stablecoins extend dollar power and buy time on debt

• Alex links U.S. policy support for stablecoins to dollar demand. He cannot recall the precise share, estimating dollar denomination at “90 something%” and subsequently “probably 99%.” His proposed flywheel: more stablecoin supply creates more Treasury purchases by issuers, lowering rates—or, as he qualifies it, “at least tries to keep them down a little bit”—while dollarizing other economies.

• Tommy raises the apparent contradiction: America has roughly $40 trillion of debt while its currency becomes more important. Alex calls stablecoins “a way of exporting the debt or at least kicking the can down the road a little bit longer.” He does not present this as a solution: debt remains an issue, but the mechanism provides more time.

• On foreign monetary sovereignty, Alex says countries will not “go down without a fight.” From nearly 200 currencies, he thinks the count is “probably fewer than 25” in five to 10 years; Tommy suggests perhaps five or 10 on a meaningful-use basis. Alex expects some central banks to impose barriers as easier dollar access reduces reasons to hold local currency.

• The commercial transmission reaches Cyclops through payments companies serving global merchants. Businesses operating across dozens of countries want to dollarize balance sheets, exit local currencies sooner, improve conversion rates or receive money faster. Growing stablecoin access also becomes an expected service. Alex reduces the sales argument to two benefits: saving money and getting it faster.

8. Early traction has raised the ambition for the next exit

• Cyclops incorporated roughly a year before the conversation, in August, raised a Castle Island-led seed round that October, emerged from stealth in March and completed its Series A in July. Alex says inbound interest brought the Series A forward; it had not been planned for that year. Castle Island had pursued The Giving Block before its acquisition and maintained the relationship.

• The original first-year goal was Shift4 plus two other major payments companies. Alex now expects more than 10 by year-end. His ideal prospect has already struggled to build the product: some companies announced infrastructure partnerships two years earlier and still have not launched. “Guys, rip it up. Start over. We’ll get you live way faster.”

• Alex expects exit options within three to five years and leaves an IPO open, but wants “a five or 10 billion dollar exit at least.” Cyclops has received its first offer. Alex calls the first exit an “accelerant”: it taught the founders what they need, gave them investor relationships and made fundraising possible; Tommy observes that their personal finances are covered. The founders also want to keep going bigger. If this company sells for $10 billion, the ambition resets: “Next company better be 100 billion.”

• His closing advice returns to The Giving Block’s beginnings: “Most of them just never try.” An idea can start on nights and weekends until there is product-market fit and a reason to commit further. He cautions that knowing the full workload might deter people; enjoying the problems is essential. He hopes Cyclops becomes a training ground for future founders.