Author: Opool Labs
In June 2025, Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang made a public statement on social media that caused quite a stir in the crypto circle. He openly questioned the actual value of stablecoins in reducing cross-border costs, stating bluntly that the cost of converting stablecoins back to fiat currency through redemption channels is far higher than that of the traditional interbank foreign exchange market, and even said outright that cryptocurrency has not truly solved real-world problems in fifteen years.
At the time, Airwallex was valued at $6 billion, held 80 financial licenses worldwide, covered 200 countries and regions, and had annual revenue exceeding $1 billion. As a leading player in the cross-border payments track, these remarks carried considerable weight and also drew rebuttals from a large number of practitioners in the crypto industry. Zhang Shuo made only limited concessions, acknowledging only that stablecoin wallets have value as alternative payment in emerging markets.
Just 17 months later, the story took a dramatic reversal. On November 10, 2026, blockchain project Alta announced a $47.5 million Series A funding round. Combined with a $32.5 million seed round, the project's cumulative funding has reached $80 million, led by Index Ventures with participation from Google Ventures GV and other institutions, and Zhang Shuo is prominently listed among Alta's co-founders.
Most outsiders simply interpret this as the founder "slapping his own face" and "真香" (being won over), but peeling back the surface reveals: Zhang Shuo has not changed his view of ordinary crypto assets. What drove him to enter the arena was not crypto faith, but business survival logic. A competition centered on the stablecoin settlement layer has fully begun, and if payment giants are absent, they will be reduced to ordinary interfaces for upper-layer applications in the future.
What Exactly Does Alta Want to Do: Not a General-Purpose Public Chain, but a Compliant L1 Serving Licensed Institutions
Many people easily misunderstand and think that Alta wants to build a competing public chain for ordinary crypto users. The truth is exactly the opposite. Alta is positioned as a layer-1 public chain for banks and licensed payment institutions, and its target customers have been traditional financial institutions from the very beginning, not retail traders.
Project co-founder Loong Wang previously founded the well-known DeFi project Ren Protocol. He stated publicly that if an existing mature network could satisfy all institutional demands, the team would not have chosen to develop an L1 public chain from scratch. Existing public chains such as Ethereum and Solana cannot simultaneously meet traditional institutions' four hard requirements: privacy, strong compliance, integration with local financial systems, and liquidity guarantees. This is the core reason for building their own underlying layer.
On the technical level, Alta adopts a recursive zero-knowledge proof architecture to achieve a very critical capability: transactions can complete compliance verification on-chain without exposing the identities of both parties or the transaction amount, balancing regulatory review and institutional transaction privacy. In product design, it makes many anti-crypto-native choices: the protocol layer directly embeds programmable compliance modules and a native identity authorization system, and even adds an anti-airdrop mechanism so that unauthorized addresses cannot initiate transfers to users, solving the malicious asset harassment problem that banking institutions dread.
The team composition also points to a traditional financial cooperation route. Another co-founder, Catherine Porter, previously led external partnerships for Meta's Libra (Diem) and later served as an advisor to Mysten Labs and Aptos, with deep experience in cooperation with traditional financial institutions.
Zhang Shuo's understanding of stablecoins has also moved beyond the old framework of "cheap cross-border remittance tool." In his view, exchanging local currency for USD stablecoins is essentially a foreign exchange transaction; as scale expands, stablecoins are growing into an independent dollar liquidity market with its own quotes and spreads, and will interact with the traditional foreign exchange market. The real long-term opportunity comes from the programmable nature of money: stablecoins turn funds into software components, enabling automated fund management and multi-party collaborative settlement, and providing infrastructure support for future AI agents to trade autonomously.
Airwallex's Hidden Card: Behind the $80 Million Is a Ready Channel of Tens of Millions of Enterprise Customers
Alta's biggest advantage does not come simply from the $80 million in funding, but from the ready-made network resources brought by its strategic partner Airwallex.
Airwallex is not merely a financial investor, but also Alta's core design partner and distribution engine. This cross-border payment giant has annualized transaction volume of $287 billion, annual revenue of $1.3 billion, coverage in 200 countries, and support for 90 fiat currencies. In the future, Alta's underlying chain will directly connect to Airwallex's payment rails and channel the platform's massive enterprise customers to this new public chain. This is a starting condition that most new public chain startups can hardly match.
Insiders put it more bluntly: Zhang Shuo has not become a crypto believer; it is simply that market customer demand continues to rise, and with the global stablecoin regulatory framework gradually becoming clearer, the company chose to integrate this on-chain settlement technology into its own business portfolio.
Here it is necessary to clarify the internal consistency of the views before and after: what Zhang Shuo criticized back then was "relying on stablecoins to reduce ordinary cross-border currency exchange fees"; what he is betting on now is on-chain settlement infrastructure for tokenized fiat currency. In his framework, stablecoins are not crypto speculative assets, but a new on-chain form of fiat currency. Criticizing speculative narratives and embracing compliant tokenized settlement are not contradictory.
Stripe Has Already Taken the Lead, and the Industry Arms Race Has Begun
The direct pressure driving Airwallex to decisively enter the arena comes from the full-stack layout of direct competitor Stripe.
Stripe has already built a complete stablecoin technology stack: in October 2024, it spent $1.1 billion to acquire stablecoin issuance infrastructure company Bridge; at the end of 2025, it acquired wallet service provider Privy, gaining access to 75 million embedded wallets; in 2026, it partnered with Paradigm to incubate payment-focused public chain Tempo, raising $500 million at a valuation of $5 billion, and completed mainnet launch in March.
The division of labor among the three is clear: Bridge handles stablecoin minting and redemption and off-ramp channels; Privy provides embedded wallets; Tempo undertakes underlying settlement. The entire chain can operate independently without external public chains. OpenAI, Shopify, Deutsche Bank, and Visa have all become Tempo partners, and as of November 2026, more than 100 services have completed integration. Stripe has publicly stated its goal: to become "the AWS of money."
If Airwallex does not make a layout, then in the future, when stablecoin settlement becomes standard for enterprise cross-border business, its own massive payment network will only be able to run on competitors' chains and become an application interface dependent on the underlying layer, losing the right to speak in infrastructure. Alta is Airwallex's key chip for responding to this competition.
Looking at the entire track, building chains is no longer an isolated case. A host of players are aiming at the institutional-grade on-chain settlement track:
Circle launched the Arc network to serve USDC institutional cross-chain settlement;
Fireblocks built a global stablecoin network connecting off-ramp, liquidity, and compliance service providers;
Canton Network, backed by Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and BNP Paribas, focuses on tokenized asset clearing for licensed financial institutions.
The size of the stablecoin market is already enough to prove the value of the track. As of mid-2026, the total market capitalization of stablecoins exceeded $320 billion, with USDT accounting for 59%, about $187 billion, and USDC accounting for 24%, about $75 billion. In all of 2025, total on-chain transaction volume exceeded $33 trillion, of which USDC transaction volume was $18.3 trillion, already surpassing USDT's $13.3 trillion.
But market capitalization and transaction volume are only surface indicators; the real focus of the game lies in the settlement layer. Whoever controls the complete process of stablecoin minting, on-chain clearing, and fiat redemption holds the pricing power of the next generation of financial infrastructure.
In This War, Technology Is Only a Supporting Role; Network and Compliance Are the Decisive Factors
Many crypto communities are accustomed to judging the success or failure of a public chain by TPS and cryptographic innovation, but for finance-specific L1s such as Alta and Tempo, technical performance is only a ticket to entry. What truly determines life or death are three things.
First, the genuine willingness of traditional financial institutions to adopt.The value of an institutional public chain lies not in how cool the technology is, but in how many banks and enterprises are willing to migrate their business. Although Alta inherits Airwallex's customer resources, whether these enterprises will truly migrate their core settlement business onto it still carries enormous uncertainty. It is easy for institutions to conduct technology pilots, but migrating core fund pathways is extremely cautious.
Second, the ability to adapt to compliance across multiple global jurisdictions.The biggest selling point of this type of institutional chain is compliance built into the protocol layer, but regulatory policies vary enormously across countries. Whether programmable compliance can adapt to different countries' anti-money laundering and identity verification rules is a huge test. Once the regulatory stance of a major jurisdiction shifts, the value of the entire design will be greatly diminished.
Third, the efficiency of connecting the chain with the real-world banking system.The ultimate value of stablecoins lies in being able to seamlessly convert back to fiat currency. No matter how fast on-chain settlement is, if the off-ramp channels are costly and inefficient, it will repeat the pain points Zhang Shuo originally criticized about stablecoins. On-chain is only half; the off-chain fiat rails are the indispensable other half.
We can also see an interesting industry paradigm shift: in the past, the blockchain industry always discussed subverting traditional finance; now, traditional fintech giants like Stripe and Airwallex are entering the field with a completely different approach — not to subvert banks, but to build a set of infrastructure, to let traditional finance voluntarily come onto the chain.
Faith is no longer important; pragmatism is now dominating the entire track.
Final Words
Zhang Shuo's journey from publicly questioning stablecoins to co-founding Alta is not a 180-degree reversal of personal stance, but an iteration of the industry paradigm. The early market always treated stablecoins as a cheap remittance tool, but now the industry sees a bigger picture: stablecoins are programmable currency carriers, a brand-new financial track for corporate treasury management, multi-party settlement, and AI agent transactions.
Of course, entering the field does not equal victory. An $80 million financing round and built-in customer channels only get you a ticket to compete. Alta will next face fierce competition from Stripe Tempo and a host of institutional settlement networks. To judge Alta's success or failure in the future, do not look at the scale of financing or the technical white paper, but at how many third-party financial institutions truly connect and how much real business runs on this chain.
The curtain on the settlement layer has just risen. In the coming years, the main battlefield for the integration of traditional finance and the crypto world will not be retail trading, but here.
