Cycles, the crypto startup and economic experiment founded by Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman, has raised $6.4 million in fresh funding.
The round was led by Blockchange Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Compound VC, Primitive Ventures, and angels. It brings Cycles’ total funding to $8.7 million, following a $2.3 million pre-seed, co-led by CMCC Global and Maven 11, in May 2025.
Cycles is an “open clearing protocol” designed to provide more efficient multilateral netting, allowing more parties to clear more transactions with less capital. In TradFi, clearing houses net out what everyone owes each other, without needing to move huge amounts of money to clear every single trade or payment.
The new protocol uses zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments (TEEs), graph algorithms, and other tech to form a kind of web of obligations that can more efficiently look to clear the greatest number of transactions using the least capital.
"Our goal is to build a universal capital-efficient payments and finance engine to allow everyone to do more with less," Cycles creator Ethan Buchman said. "Clearing is a financial superpower, yet it’s only available to the largest financial institutions via clearing houses or to small groups of friends splitting bills.”
