I still remember the first time I heard a seasoned payments executive flat out dismiss cryptocurrency as little more than digital religion. That was Jack Zhang a couple of years ago. Fast forward to today and the same executive is listed as a cofounder of a brand new Layer 1 blockchain that just closed a hefty 47.5 million Series A. The irony is hard to ignore, and it makes this particular funding story far more interesting than the usual round of venture capital announcements.
Why a Crypto Skeptic Suddenly Backed a Blockchain Project
Alta, previously known as Metal, has raised 47.5 million dollars in a Series A round led by Index Ventures. Participation came from GV, Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg and Capital49, the investment arm tied to the founders of Airwallex. Combined with an earlier 32.5 million seed round, total capital now sits at roughly 80 million. The money will go toward building what the team describes as institutional grade payment infrastructure with privacy and compliance features baked directly into the protocol.
What makes the story stand out is not simply the size of the check. It is the people writing it. Jack Zhang, cofounder and CEO of Airwallex, spent years publicly questioning whether crypto had delivered any meaningful real world utility. In mid 2025 he posted that after fifteen years he still could not point to a single use case that meaningfully solved a problem outside a handful of emerging markets. He compared the space more to religion than technology. Even as recently as early 2026 he argued that Airwallex already moved money faster and more cheaply than stablecoins could.
Something clearly shifted. According to people close to the discussions, Zhang began exploring blockchain options more seriously once customer demand for stablecoin rails grew louder and the limitations of traditional correspondent banking became harder to ignore. He connected with Loong Wang through a mutual contact. The two decided to build together. Catherine Porter, who previously worked on Meta’s abandoned digital currency project, joined as the third cofounder. Zhang is now officially listed as a cofounder of Alta while Airwallex has become both an investor and an early design partner.
In the funding announcement Zhang struck a different tone. He pointed to the rise of agentic banking and programmable payments, noting that stablecoins are turning into an important settlement vector. That is a long way from calling the entire category a religion. Markets change. So do opinions when the data starts pointing in a new direction.
What Alta Is Actually Building
Alta is developing its own Layer 1 blockchain rather than launching yet another application on an existing network. The team has been open about the decision. They say they would not have built an L1 if they did not feel they had to. Existing chains, even those already used for institutional transactions, still fall short on the combination of privacy and regulatory control that large banks require.
The architecture relies on recursive zero knowledge cryptography. In practical terms this allows the network to prove that compliance rules have been followed without revealing balances, customer identities or internal policies to the public ledger. Financial institutions keep control over who they transact with. One planned feature lets an institution reject unwanted transfers from external wallet addresses. Public chains currently force recipients to accept tokens whether they want them or not. That single limitation has blocked more adoption conversations than most people outside the industry realize.
The first product focus is straightforward and potentially very large. Businesses currently keep enormous amounts of capital sitting in prefunded accounts simply to support cross border payments. Industry estimates put the global figure near four trillion dollars. Alta wants to let those same businesses access funds on demand, execute foreign exchange, and move idle balances into yield bearing tokenized assets when the money is not needed for settlement. If the model works, the capital efficiency gains could be substantial.
Airwallex plans to connect its existing global payments infrastructure to the new chain. That integration could open stablecoin deposits and withdrawals while still giving access to local payment networks across roughly two hundred countries and ninety currencies. The partnership is not theoretical. Airwallex is already treating Alta as a design partner, which means real payment flows and real operational requirements will shape the protocol from the start.
The Broader Race for Institutional Payment Rails
Alta is not entering an empty field. Stripe and Paradigm launched the Tempo mainnet earlier this year with a clear focus on stablecoin payments and transactions between AI agents. Tempo later integrated Morpho lending, giving businesses on the network access to decentralized credit markets. Traditional banks have also started experimenting on public chains. In September a major U.S. bank completed a cross border stablecoin payment between its North American and European operations using Stellar. The direction of travel is visible even if the final winners remain unclear.
What separates Alta’s pitch is the emphasis on privacy controls that feel closer to traditional finance than to open public ledgers. Most existing blockchains optimize for transparency. Banks and large payment firms optimize for the opposite. They need to prove compliance to regulators without broadcasting every detail of every transaction to the entire world. Zero knowledge approaches have been discussed for years. Turning those approaches into production grade infrastructure that large institutions will actually trust is still rare.
Loong Wang brings relevant background. He previously founded Republic Protocol, later rebranded Ren, which was acquired by Alameda Research in 2021. After that he spent time on quantum computing applications in drug discovery before returning to blockchain. The current team sits at about twenty five people split between San Francisco and Melbourne. Valuation after the latest round has not been disclosed.
Privacy Features That Matter to Banks
Walk into any large bank treasury department and ask about public blockchains. The conversation usually hits the same walls quickly. Transaction data sits in the open. Counterparties cannot be selectively blocked. Internal risk policies cannot be enforced at the protocol level. Alta is trying to remove those objections one by one.
Recursive zero knowledge proofs sit at the center of the design. The network can verify that a transaction meets certain compliance criteria without revealing the underlying amounts or identities. Institutions can set rules about acceptable counterparties and have those rules enforced by the chain itself. Unsolicited transfers can be rejected. Sensitive customer information stays protected. These are not exotic features for traditional finance. They are table stakes. The fact that most public chains still struggle with them explains why institutional adoption has remained cautious.
I have spoken with enough treasury managers over the years to know that capital trapped in prefunded accounts is a constant source of frustration. The money sits idle, earns little, and still has to be maintained across multiple currencies and corridors. Any system that can free even a portion of that capital while keeping settlement reliable will attract attention. Alta’s early product roadmap targets exactly that friction.
How the Funding Will Be Used
The 47.5 million will primarily support three areas. First, continued development of the core blockchain and the privacy compliance stack. Second, additional institutional partnerships beyond the existing relationship with Airwallex. Third, expansion of the engineering and compliance teams. Building for regulated financial institutions requires more than smart contract developers. It requires people who understand bank risk frameworks, regulatory reporting and operational resilience.
Index Ventures leading the round carries weight. The firm has backed a number of successful infrastructure and fintech companies. GV’s involvement adds another layer of credibility. Capital49’s participation is logical given the Airwallex connection. The investor list suggests the round was competitive and that several experienced capital allocators see a real path to institutional adoption.
Still, building a new Layer 1 is never simple. Attracting validators, achieving meaningful security, and convincing risk committees inside large banks all take time. Many previous attempts have struggled with one or more of those hurdles. Alta’s advantage may lie in the early design partnership with a payments company that already moves substantial volume across borders. Real usage from day one can accelerate learning in ways pure research projects cannot match.
Changing Minds in Payments Circles
Jack Zhang’s public evolution is worth watching closely. Payments executives who once dismissed crypto often did so for understandable reasons. Early stablecoin rails were slow, expensive in certain corridors, or operationally immature. Volatility of non stable assets created additional risk. Regulatory clarity remained incomplete in many jurisdictions. Those objections carried weight.
Over the last eighteen months several of those conditions have improved. Stablecoin volumes have grown. Settlement times on certain networks have tightened. More banks have received regulatory clarity around digital asset custody and transfer. Customer requests for on chain settlement options have increased. When the data changes, rational operators update their views. Zhang appears to have done exactly that.
His presence as a cofounder also changes the marketing dynamic. Many blockchain projects struggle to gain the attention of traditional finance decision makers. Having a well known payments CEO attached to the project opens doors that pure crypto native teams often find closed. That soft power should not be underestimated.
Potential Impact on Cross Border Payments
Cross border payments remain one of the most expensive and opaque parts of the global financial system. Correspondent banking chains introduce delays, fees and limited visibility. Prefunding requirements lock up capital. Reconciliation is still largely manual in many corridors. Blockchain based settlement has long been held out as a potential improvement, yet real world adoption at scale has been slower than early forecasts suggested.
Alta’s approach tries to meet banks where they are rather than asking them to abandon existing controls. Privacy features, selective counterparty acceptance, and compliance proofs are designed to fit inside current risk frameworks. If the network can deliver faster settlement while reducing the need for large prefunded balances, the economic case becomes clearer. Pairing that with Airwallex’s existing local payment network access across two hundred countries creates a potentially powerful combination.
Of course execution remains everything. Technical performance under institutional load, regulatory acceptance in key markets, and operational resilience all have to be proven. Early design partnerships help, but production volume will be the real test.
Looking at the Competitive Landscape
Tempo from Stripe and Paradigm is already live and focused on similar settlement use cases. Public chains such as Stellar have demonstrated that banks can move stablecoins across borders when the operational pieces are in place. Other Layer 1 and Layer 2 projects continue to court institutional users with varying degrees of success. Alta is entering a field that is heating up rather than cooling down.
Differentiation will likely rest on the depth of the privacy and compliance tooling. Many networks offer some form of confidential transactions or permissioned features. Few have designed the entire architecture around the specific constraints that large regulated institutions face every day. Whether Alta’s recursive zero knowledge approach delivers enough practical advantage remains to be seen in production, but the problem it is trying to solve is real.
The team’s decision to build a new Layer 1 rather than an application or a Layer 2 also carries both opportunity and risk. Full control over the base layer allows tighter integration of the privacy features. It also means the project must bootstrap its own security and liquidity. That is a heavier lift than launching on an established chain, yet the founders clearly believe the trade off is necessary.
What Comes Next for Alta
Near term priorities are clear. Continue developing the core protocol. Hire additional engineering and compliance talent. Expand the set of institutional partners. Convert the Airwallex design partnership into measurable payment volume. Each of those steps will provide clearer signals about whether the thesis is working.
Longer term success will depend on more than technology. Trust inside risk committees, regulatory comfort, and consistent operational performance will matter just as much. Blockchain projects that ignore those softer factors often struggle even when the code itself is solid.
I find the personal angle almost as interesting as the technical one. Watching a high profile payments executive move from open skepticism to active cofounder status in the space is rare. It suggests that the practical utility of certain blockchain applications has finally become hard enough to ignore. Markets have a way of converting even the most consistent skeptics once the numbers start to add up.
Alta still has a long road ahead. Building institutional grade infrastructure is measured in years rather than months. Yet the combination of experienced founders, meaningful capital, an early payments partner with real volume, and a clear focus on the privacy controls that banks actually need gives the project a stronger starting position than many earlier attempts. Whether that is enough will be determined by the next few years of execution.
For now the story stands as a useful reminder. In finance, as in most industries, strongly held opinions can evolve when new evidence arrives. Jack Zhang’s journey from dismissing crypto as religion to helping build a new blockchain is one of the clearer recent examples. The 47.5 million raised this week simply puts additional fuel behind that shift.
The coming months will show whether Alta can turn its privacy focused design into production volume that traditional finance teams actually trust. If it succeeds, the conversation around institutional blockchain adoption may look quite different by the end of the decade. If it struggles, it will join a long list of well funded experiments that never quite crossed the last mile. Either outcome will teach the industry something useful. For the moment, the capital is in place and the team has a clear problem it intends to solve. That alone is more than many projects can claim at this stage.
