Performances
RD Popularity Index
RD Growth Index
Comparison
Follow Updates
Follow Lists
People
About Colossus
Colossus (Colossus Pay) is an emerging crypto-native payment network that builds its settlement layer on Ethereum as an OP Stack optimistic rollup for card consumers and merchant acquirers. It addresses the high fees and mandatory KYC of the Visa/Mastercard duopoly by reusing EMV card and terminal infrastructure, turning card signatures into ERC-4337 transactions, settling non-custodially in stablecoins at the acquirer layer, with cross-chain stablecoin funding bridged through the LayerZero OFT V2 cross-chain messaging layer. Unlike crypto cards that plug into Visa/Mastercard, Colossus deals directly with acquirers, skipping the issuer and card-network stack.
Colossus claims about 100ms preconfirmation and 92% to 96% fee reduction and counts issuers like Frax, Solayer and Kraken, but its model depends on difficult integration with conservative acquirers, and the KYC-free positioning still carries regulatory uncertainty under current frameworks.
Colossus was founded by Delong, former CTO of SushiSwap, with a four-person team, raising $500,000 in pre-seed funding at a $10 million valuation to build a stablecoin credit card network independent of Visa and Mastercard.
The U.S. GENIUS Act took effect, which Colossus cited to argue that its stablecoin transfers do not require KYC/AML or a money transmitter license, offering a regulatory pathway for a card network without traditional banking rails.
Colossus launched ColossusNet (Chain ID 951), an Ethereum L2 that repurposes existing EMV card terminals so chip card signatures directly create ERC-4337 transactions, enabling 100ms pre-confirmation settlement.
In March 2026 Joseph Delong's Colossus launched Colossus Pay, turning the signature generated during an EMV card swipe into an Ethereum private key so each swipe produces an ERC-4337 transaction signature settled in stablecoins; the company claims roughly 100-millisecond pre-confirmation, fees 92% to 96% below traditional acquiring, and keeps acquirers as the merchant-facing entry point.
Colossus vertically integrates issuing, processing and clearing into its own layer-2, treats the account address as the only identity, collects as little KYC data as possible, argues the GENIUS Act does not require it to run issuer-style AML checks, and instead has its sequencer filter OFAC-sanctioned addresses before batching. Issuers including Frax Finance, Solayer Labs and Kraken provide support. The team has four people, a $500,000 pre-seed at a $10 million valuation; several KYC-less card projects have exited in the same period, including UnCash, which shut down.
Colossus's hard part is distribution: integrating directly with acquirers such as Fiserv, Elavon and Worldpay that control point-of-sale terminal software, so stablecoins settle to merchants without an issuing bank or card network in the flow. The in-house L2 keeps converting EMV card signatures into ERC-4337 transactions, and the sequencer filters addresses against the OFAC list before bundling instead of running per-user KYC. With a team of four, the model has to be locked in before the regulatory reading tightens.
Joseph Delong founded the company and is chief executive. A veteran ethereum developer, he has spent his career on smart contracts and protocol infrastructure, was chief technology officer at SushiSwap from 2020 to 2021, and started this project in 2025 from his home in San Antonio.
All team members have protocol engineering backgrounds. There is no traditional functional layering, with engineering, research and operations run by the founder and outside legal and technical input brought in as advisers.
The other members cover consensus, cryptography and client work, with changes reviewed by the founder.
Delong's desk looks more like an electronics workshop, covered in point-of-sale test terminals, card readers and manufacturer sample books, which he treats as scarce knowledge few people can obtain.
He ran many multi-chain deployments at SushiSwap and has since turned that experience towards protocol design in the payments space.