For diamond-handed blockchain expert Kyle Sonlin, the future of finance isn’t about buzzwords. It’s about shaving days off settlement times. It’s about helping a pineapple exporter in Costa Rica get paid faster, or helping a family office in Miami close a $75 million oil and gas acquisition in Latin America entirely on-chain.
That second one? Already done.
UM grad Sonlin is the founder and CEO of Global Settlement Network, a blockchain company headquartered in Miami. Recently the company made headlines for facilitating what it says is the world’s first fully tokenized capital stack for an operating energy asset: a $75 million acquisition of a Latin American oil and gas facility by Feniix Energy.
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The entire deal ran through Global Settlement’s GSX Protocol, using tokenized debt and equity, settled in stablecoins. No banks. No wires. Just programmable transactions that took minutes instead of weeks.
“This wasn’t a proof of concept,” Sonlin [pictured above] told Refresh Miami. “This was a real M&A transaction with real operating assets, and we closed it end-to-end on blockchain.”
It’s the kind of technical milestone that can be easy to miss unless you’ve spent years trying to move money between countries. Sonlin has. In fact, Global Settlement was born from his direct experience with the friction in cross-border capital flows – especially in markets like Latin America, where large-scale commercial transactions often stall because of regulatory bottlenecks or antiquated infrastructure.
“Moving a container from Latin America to the U.S. isn’t the problem,” he said. “The bottleneck is getting paid. The logistics are ready before the wire transfer even clears.”
More than just frustrating, that lag can be expensive. Delays in payment settlement mean lost revenue, degraded goods, and higher costs across the board. According to Sonlin, banks have no real incentive to speed things up. “There’s a whole business built around holding your money and earning yield while you wait,” he said.
That’s where tokenization comes in. By replacing traditional rails like SWIFT with blockchain-based systems that work across chains and across asset classes, Global Settlement is offering an alternative that doesn’t force users into the crypto weeds.
“A lot of existing solutions were built by devs for devs,” Sonlin said. “We’re focused on helping people actually get deals done.”
And these aren’t small deals. Most of Global Settlement’s clients are large family offices and high-net-worth individuals dealing with commodities, trade finance, or energy-related assets. What they share is a need for compliant, cross-border capital movement – ideally one that doesn’t require navigating a tangle of disconnected blockchains or intermediaries with unclear rules.
To that end, Global Settlement’s protocol includes built-in compliance features like KYC, AML, and accreditation checks. It also avoids “bridges,” the common way blockchains talk to each other, but a major security weak spot in crypto. “We’re not reinventing the asset,” Sonlin said. “We’re just making the transaction layer faster, cheaper, and safer.”
With a 10-person team split between Miami and remote locations, the company is now gearing up for growth. The pipeline includes billions of dollars in assets expected to move through its infrastructure. Many of those will come from repeat trades in the commodities sector such as weekly allocations that, over time, add up to enormous volume.
Sonlin, who’s been building in Miami since 2015, sees the city as the perfect base. “This ecosystem has given me so much,” he said. “Whether it’s the family offices, the developers, or just the energy here, it’s a place where capital and culture actually mix.”
And while he’s quick to credit blockchain and smart contracts, Sonlin still describes his work as “hand-to-hand combat.” Technology, for him, is a tool. What matters is solving real problems for real businesses.
“We’re not trying to force crypto onto people,” he said. “We’re just making finance work the way it should.”
This story was originally published by Refresh Miami, a WLRN News partner. Refresh Miami is the oldest and largest tech and startup community in Miami with over 16,000 members.
