Alta raises $47.5 million for bank-focused blockchain

The November 10 funding announcement also named GV, formerly Google Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg and Capital49 as investors. Capital49 was established by Airwallex’s founders. The round follows Alta’s $32.5 million seed financing, backed primarily by Airwallex. Formerly known as Metal, Alta is led by CEO Loong Wang, with Zhang and former Meta executive Catherine Porter also listed as co-founders.

Zhang has previously questioned whether cryptocurrencies solve real-world problems. In a June 2025 LinkedIn post, he wrote that after about 15 years he had not seen a meaningful use case, apart from some emerging markets in Africa and Latin America, and called crypto “more like a religion than technology.” As recently as March 2026, he argued that Airwallex could move money faster and more cheaply with its existing infrastructure. He later said stablecoins were becoming important for settlement as agentic banking and programmable payments grew.

Airwallex is an investor and early design partner. It plans to connect its global payments infrastructure to Alta’s blockchain, with the collaboration expected to support stablecoin deposits and withdrawals and links to local payment networks across 200 countries and 90 currencies.

Alta says its Layer 1 network will use recursive zero-knowledge cryptography to verify compliance without publicly revealing balances, customer identities or internal policies. Institutions would also be able to reject transfers from external wallet addresses. The company’s first planned product is aimed at reducing the funds businesses keep in prefunded accounts for international transactions. Alta estimates about $4 trillion is tied up in such accounts globally; its proposed system would let businesses access funds when needed, conduct foreign exchange and move unused balances into yield-bearing tokenized assets.

The company plans to use the financing to build the blockchain, add institutional partnerships and expand its engineering and compliance teams. It has about 25 employees across San Francisco and Melbourne and has not disclosed its valuation.

Alta is entering a field that includes payments company Stripe and investment firm Paradigm, whose Tempo mainnet launched in March as a Layer 1 network for stablecoin payments and transactions between AI agents. In September, U.S. Bank completed a cross-border stablecoin payment between its North American and European operations using Stellar.