Alta Raises $47.5 Million for Institutional Blockchain

By Nathan Brooks

Alta raised $47.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Index Ventures to develop payment infrastructure for banks and financial institutions, lifting the company’s total funding to $80 million, according to its November 10 announcement.

The round included GV, formerly Google Ventures; Blackbird Ventures; Square Peg; and Capital49, a venture firm established by the founders of payments company Airwallex. It followed a $32.5 million seed round backed primarily by Airwallex.

A founder skeptical of crypto

Alta, formerly known as Metal, now lists Airwallex cofounder and CEO Jack Zhang as a cofounder. Zhang helped establish the company after years of publicly questioning cryptocurrency utility.

In a June 2025 LinkedIn post, Zhang said he had found no meaningful real-world cryptocurrency use case after roughly 15 years, apart from some emerging markets in Africa and Latin America. He noted that many buyers had become wealthy, but described crypto as more like a religion than technology and said wealth creation did not establish practical utility.

As recently as March 2026, Zhang argued that Airwallex’s existing payment infrastructure could already move money faster and more cheaply, maintaining his skepticism of stablecoins. His position appears to have shifted as Airwallex explored blockchain for international payments and responded to customer demand for stablecoins.

Forbes reported in October that Zhang had considered establishing a blockchain company earlier that year before meeting CEO Loong Wang through a mutual friend. The two agreed to form the venture. Alta also lists Catherine Porter, a former Meta executive who worked on Meta’s abandoned cryptocurrency initiative, as a cofounder.

Airwallex has become an investor and early design partner. The companies plan to connect Airwallex’s global payments infrastructure to Alta’s chain, support stablecoin deposits and withdrawals, and provide access to local payment networks across 200 countries and 90 currencies.

“With the rise of agentic banking and programmable payments, stablecoins are becoming an important vector for settlement,” Zhang said in the funding announcement.

What does this change for banks?

Alta is building its own Layer 1, or L1, blockchain with privacy and compliance controls for institutions transferring money and other assets across borders. Institutions would retain control over transaction visibility and counterparties, while recursive zero-knowledge cryptography would verify compliance requirements without publicly exposing balances, customer identities or internal policies.

Loong Wang told Fortune that existing blockchain networks, including those already used for financial transactions, lack the combination of privacy and regulatory controls that major financial institutions require. “We often say we wouldn’t have built an L-1 if we didn’t have to,” Wang said.

The design would also let institutions reject transfers from unwanted external wallet addresses. That addresses a public-chain constraint: users can receive tokens without approving the sender in advance. For compliance teams, the practical distinction is control at the wallet boundary rather than after settlement.

Alta’s first planned product targets capital tied up in prefunded accounts used to support international transactions. The company estimates that about $4 trillion sits in these accounts globally.

Businesses would use the proposed system to access funds when needed, execute foreign-exchange transactions, and move unused balances into yield-bearing tokenized assets. The financing will fund blockchain development, additional institutional partnerships, and expansion of Alta’s engineering and compliance teams.

Competition moves closer to payments

The proposal arrives as payment firms and public networks encroach on stablecoin settlement. Payments company Stripe and crypto investment firm Paradigm launched the Tempo mainnet in March, an L1 for stablecoin payments and transactions between AI agents. Tempo integrated Morpho lending in May, giving businesses access to decentralized lending markets through the payments network.

Institutional adoption has also reached existing public blockchains. In September, U.S. Bank completed a cross-border stablecoin payment between its North American and European operations using Stellar.

Those deployments set a practical bar for Alta: the company must show that its privacy architecture reduces operational friction without introducing settlement, compliance or integration burdens of its own. Airwallex’s design-partner role gives Alta an initial institutional pathway.

CEO Wang previously founded Republic Protocol, later renamed Ren, which Alameda Research acquired in 2021. He then founded QDX, focused on quantum-computing applications in drug discovery, before returning to blockchain development.

Alta employs about 25 people across San Francisco and Melbourne and did not disclose its valuation after the round. For now, the structural change is clear: stablecoin settlement is moving inside bank-controlled payment corridors, and Alta’s ability to turn that design into live institutional volume will determine whether the $80 million financing changes payments operations or simply adds another blockchain to the field.