Cycles, a startup developing an open, privacy-preserving clearing network for digital asset markets and stablecoin payments, has raised $6.4m in a funding round led by Blockchange Ventures.
Coinbase Ventures, Compound VC, Primitive Ventures, and a number of angel investors also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total funding to $8.7m. This follows a $2.3m pre-seed raise in 2025. The fresh capital will be used to accelerate the build-out and deployment of the Cycles clearing network, as well as to scale the first products developed on top of it.
Among those products is Cycles Prime, the company’s inaugural institutional offering, which allows trading firms to privately net over-the-counter (OTC) obligations across the network. The product is designed to reduce liquidity requirements and counterparty exposure without the need for collateral, asset movement, or changes to existing counterparty relationships. Cycles Prime is launching with Lynq and FalconX as anchor partners.
Spun out of Informal Systems and led by Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman, Cycles runs a multilateral clearing network that nets obligations across digital asset trading and payment flows, aiming to improve capital efficiency and open up new avenues for growth.
The company is building a unified clearing network as a base layer for an ecosystem of capital-efficient financial applications, with two initial products built on a shared clearing architecture: Cycles Prime for institutional trading firms, and Cycles Pay for stablecoin payments.
Cycles Pay is a stablecoin payments application aimed at both individuals and businesses, enabling users to send and receive payments, put idle balances to work, and maintain privacy throughout. Payments are processed through Cycles’ clearing engine, which nets obligations across participants to reduce capital movement. The app also offers invoicing and expense management features, with credit functionality described as forthcoming.
Cycles co-founder and CEO Ethan Buchman said, “Clearing is a financial superpower that has historically only been available to large financial institutions. Our goal is to bring that superpower to everyone else, through a privacy-preserving clearing network with capital efficiency at its core, and without centralized intermediaries.”
Blockchange Ventures general partner Rob Schmults said, “Clearing is the cornerstone of capital-efficient markets like foreign exchange allowing the movement of massive volumes of value without crippling liquidity requirements.
“We see Cycles providing an essential coordination layer to bring the efficiency and effectiveness of clearing to new markets. Doing this will allow businesses to clear and settle payments privately, optimize capital flow, and reduce the need for idle capital. As global adoption accelerates, Cycles can become a category defining standard for how value is settled and netted across entire ecosystems and markets.”
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