How America Is Exporting Its $40 Trillion Debt

Alex Wilson is co-founder and co-CEO of Cyclops, which builds stablecoin rails for payments companies. Before that he co-founded The Giving Block, which lets nonprofits accept crypto, and sold it to Shift4 in 2022. Alex tells Tommy how he went from flipping domain names and selling neighbors’ gear on eBay in high school to building The Giving Block nights and weekends, launching into a bear market, quitting his job at the start of Covid, and selling to Shift4 a year after raising. He talks about the $50 million Pineapple Fund donation, beating Coinbase by going narrow, and what he learned working under Jared Isaacman. Then Cyclops: why payments companies were stitching together ten crypto providers, why Shift4 became a customer and an investor, Blue Origin tickets paid in stablecoins, why payments companies win and banks lose, agent-ready checkouts, and why he thinks most of the world’s 200 currencies won’t survive the dollar.