How much money is actually needed for a market to settle? Far less than you'd think.
Ethan lays out the core Cycles idea:
netting obligations before asking anyone for more cash.
We're building Cycles to make clearing accessible to everyone. If A owes B $100, and B owes A $80, only $20 actually needs to move. It’s a simple idea that frees up an enormous amount of money at scale.
Crypto payments for businesses shouldn’t require exposing every transaction publicly, nor force settling each payment one by one.
Banks already use private "clearing clubs" to net obligations and reduce liquidity needs.
@cyclesmoney brings that model on-chain for everyone, using a combination of cryptographic privacy mechanisms to preserve transaction confidentiality.
More on why this matters👇
https://t.co/QmAcCwWoRN
Cycles Pay is the first privacy-preserving crypto payment app for businesses.
This is possible because of few specific design choices:
First, the private keys stay on your mobile device. User actions are cryptographically signed by your private key before being submitted on-chain. The financial data is encrypted with that key and doesn’t leave your mobile device.
Second, Cycles Pay uses a shielded pool to hide account balances on-chain. They are tracked as encrypted commitments and no one can see the underlying amounts or participants.
Third, when you make a payment, a ZK proof is generated and verified on-chain to confirm the transaction is valid without revealing the amount or the counterparty. Users get blockchain integrity without exposing the transaction details.
We’ve raised $8.7M to bring clearing to the masses. Our new round was led by Blockchange to work on the most powerful idea in finance.
It’s not just about moving money faster & cheaper; it’s about moving less while doing more.
We're resetting Informal to focus on the highest impact opportunities in front of us. Today we’re announcing the new @informalinc, a more focused and refined Informal, with two big bets, one in software, one in money.
We started Informal with a simple mission: to foster trust in software and money. We pursued that mission through a variety of means: research, engineering, audits, staking, cross-chain relaying, and various incubated projects. Our technology helped move ecosystems forward. But through all that we lost focus, spread ourselves too thin. While we felt everything we did was valuable, it was too much. So we have decided to simplify.
Our two big bets aren’t new. In fact we’ve been betting on them for years already. It’s just that now they are our exclusive focus.
The first is @quint_lang, a big bet on transforming how we approach and trust software. AI has already dramatically reshaped the cost of producing code, but now the problem becomes validating it. How do we know the code is correct? How do we express ourselves and our intent in a way that can be reliably iterated on with machines and can produce correct outcomes? How do we reason about and test our systems in this new AI-based world?
Quint is our answer. A way to formally specify systems so humans and machines can reason about them together. It’s not about replacing developers, it’s about making intent explicit.
Today we’re announcing the launch of Quint as its own company, with @bugarela as CEO, and an incredible team from Informal joining her. Follow her! And learn more about the team and what they're working on: https://t.co/V1xpxp7VBN
The second is @cyclesmoney, a big bet on transforming how we approach and trust money. We’ve been pioneers in the cryptocurrency space for a decade, but something is still missing in how we think about money. Everyone is so focused on moving assets faster and faster that they miss the underlying reason we need to move those assets in the first place - the debts we have with each other.
Cycles is built on the insight that we need to start from the debts. That the debts form a network, and liquidity is hidden in the structure of the network. That the debts can be *cleared*, with less money than you think. That clearing is the most powerful financial capability in the world and it’s available exclusively to the largest financial institutions, or to small groups of friends splitting expenses. Cycles brings that power to everyone else, to do more with less, to save liquidity, to access new avenues for growth. To trust in the graph. Cycles changes the perspective from a bilateral, transactional view to a multilateral, network view. The world is not a multi-asset spot market, it’s a network of balance sheets. Respect the Graph.
Our goal with Cycles is to clear the most debt, for the most people, with the least amount of money. We’re starting with large crypto trading firms settling T+1 that want to save liquidity, and with small crypto-businesses that want privacy for their payments.
If you want private payments with great UX and yield (thank you @hydromarkets!), follow @cyclesmoney and msg us or join our TG to try the beta https://t.co/q8E4j2Mqm4
With this refocus on Quint and Cycles, we’re winding down other parts of the business that don’t align. That means services we’re proud of and people we deeply respect, and have worked passionately with for years. Saying goodbye to people is always difficult, and we’re so grateful for everything they’ve done for Informal over the years. We’ve had the privilege of working with such incredible talent, and we’re sad to see them go. We wish them nothing but the best in future endeavours.
Through all of this, I’m beyond grateful for my two partners and co-founders at @informalinc, @ArianneFlemming and @zarinjo. We’re ready to take on this next chapter together with renewed focus. They are rock-stars. They have made it possible for us to get here, to make Quint and Cycles happen, and to grow them into generational bets. While they will primarily focus on Quint for now, they continue to support me on Cycles.
For @informalinc, we're incredibly excited to be able to focus on the highest impact outcomes we think we can tackle. And we’re bringing on new partners and investors that believe in what we’re doing.
As for me, I’m all in on @cyclesmoney with our amazing team because I believe in the power of clearing and I want to make it accessible to all. The crypto revolution is far from over. I spent 10 years transforming how the world thinks about blockchains. And I’ll spend the next 10 years doing the same for clearing.
Back to startup mode ✌️
I'm happy to announce that @quint_lang is becoming its own company with me as its CEO.
I have an incredible team joining me in this new journey as we spin out of @informalinc into Quint Co. Quint remains open source at its core, and I'm confident that the ecosystem we are building around it has the value needed to empower our amazing team to expand and maintain tools we'll all be using more and more.
AI code generation has created the opportunity for Quint not only to become sustainable, but to scale at the level we always dreamt of. I've been working hard to decrease cost and increase value of formal specifications for about 8 years, and AI agents have impacted both these factors so incredibly much that I'm now reading about formal methods from new people on social media everyday. And as with every opportunity given to me and Quint this far: I will absolutely take it.
Over the past years, Quint became not just a surface syntax for TLA+, but a tool for trust and understanding. Through Quint, I got insights about complex systems in a way I have never experienced before. AI is creating a big trust and understanding gap that I know Quint can fill, not by providing some checkmark, but by being the executable specification language that brings confidence holistically: from the design phase all the way through testing and production.
So, CEO, I know. I've internally transitioned into this role a month ago, and I couldn't have predicted how natural it feels. I'm so used to thinking about what is best for Quint and have always taken decisions very seriously, even at times when I was a one-person team. In some ways, it feels like I'm just doing the same things but with a whole lot more help. My vision has been clearer than ever, and I'm getting to exercise it many times a day, every day, across business, marketing, management and technical decisions.
By my side, I have people that complement my passion with respectable experience:
- @zarinjo, CTO, who provokes way more than I can, opening paths that I never regret pursuing.
- @josef_widder, Chief Scientist, the only person that was able to make me love Quint more than I already did, more than once.
- @ArianneFlemming, COO, which is one of those rare people that can understand banks, lawyers, technical people, and everything else as far as I'm concerned. She explains everything to us and barely needs any explanation herself.
- An extremely talented and fun technical team of real and amazing people.
I'm filled with gratitude, but we are far from done, of course. I'm confident and working hard. I'm taking this seriously while also enjoying my dream come true.
I thank everyone of you who did anything for Quint in these past four years, and I promise my dedication and passion to everything that awaits us in the future.
Informal is going back to its roots.
Today we're making a deliberate choice about where to focus. Six years ago we started with a simple mission: foster trust in software and money.
@samlafer@cyclesmoney also have you seen the system they run in slovenia? clearing accessible to all businesses in the country ....
https://t.co/mwBxpCp3BD
theres so much more clearing that could happen than does today
Ethan @buchmanster is explaining how the "Graph" mental model for Cycles @cyclesmoney is a rich area for innovation in defi, just in time for a burst of practical training on the TEE/ZK tech needed to realize it
I interviewed @buchmanster, CEO @cyclesmoney for @altcoindesknews.
He shared his thoughts on the impact of RWAs on DeFi, unlocking liquidity in the crypto market through 'clearing,' and more. Thanks @milewapr for enabling this!
Check it out below:
https://t.co/l4QzmXtDyS
Thanks @altcoindesknews for the opportunity to discuss @cyclesmoney
We're building the Open Clearing Protocol, from first principles. Privacy meets double-entry accounting meets graph theory.
Respect the Graph.
We’re about to start our Cycles Pay private beta for businesses.
We’ve built it for freelancers, startups & SMEs. In addition to the features available to users (payments, yield etc.), the business section adds a set of business features (invoicing, bills, treasury management). And of course, everything is private.
Businesses will be the primary beneficiary of Cycle’s greatest value proposition, clearing.
Clearing will allow payments to net out between participants. Instead of every transaction being settled individually, obligations are compressed into fewer flows, which will itself unlock a much bigger set of features (credit, trading, etc.) as the network grows.
We’ve started the @cyclesmoney private beta for businesses. As far as I can tell, we’ll be the first team to bring small businesses access to features like invoicing with private payments & yield and I’m very proud of that. DM me if you’d like to be part of history!
New @defidecodedpod is out!
I sit down with @buchmanster of @informalinc and @cyclesmoney .
Ethan is an outside of the box thinker who loves asking big questions, like:
"What can biology teach us about building a more balanced and efficient financial system?"
"Can blockchain help us overcome barter's coincidence of wants problem?"
"How would banks survive if they could never again make money on the float?"
"Can money be a local and global phenomenon?"
And a lot more.
Check it out!
Crypto/fintech infrastructure is too "asset-brained".
We're building for your liabilities.
Multi-lateral batch settlement for crypto trading firms.
Only from @cyclesmoney
https://t.co/9gwjq0j3I8
New blog from the Quint team on bringing MBT to EVM networks.
We modeled failures like process restarts and data corruption in a Quint spec of Emerald, then replayed those scenarios against the real code with Quint Connect.
We’re building Cycles Pay as a fintech payments app with crypto integrated. Think of it like @wise with native crypto from day one.
That’s why we’re going with a mobile‑first app model, and not a browser extension. Like with banking apps, you can initiate transactions on the Cycles web app, but you’ll need to approve them on your phone. That reduces exposure to browser risks and keeps sensitive operations in a very secure environment.
Cycles transactions use zero‑knowledge, so only you can see sensitive details like balances, contacts, or amounts. The private data is accessed securely using an encryption key stored on your mobile device rather than in the browser.
Today the mobile app only handles signing, but over time, all of Cycles Pay’s features will become accessible directly within the mobile app: deposit funds, earn yield, send & receive payments, and even move between fiat and crypto. You’ll be able to use it to pay rent.
We’ll be launching a private beta for Cycles Pay this month. If you’d like to be one of the first to try it, you can join the Cycles Telegram group and get notified as soon as it goes live: https://t.co/vQGu3x0z2m