Historical report: Opool Labs published the original article on November 14, 2026, at 15:23 UTC+8. The figures and project descriptions below reflect that reporting, not a current status check.
In June 2025, Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang publicly questioned whether stablecoins could lower cross-border payment costs, arguing that converting them back to fiat could cost more than using the conventional interbank foreign-exchange market. According to Opool Labs, he nevertheless saw potential for stablecoin wallets as a payment alternative in emerging markets.
Seventeen months later, Zhang was listed as a co-founder of Alta. The project announced a $47.5 million Series A on November 10, 2026; together with a $32.5 million seed round, the article puts its total funding at $80 million. Index Ventures led the Series A, with GV among the participating investors. The distinction in the article is between a claim about cheap currency conversion and a proposed infrastructure for tokenized-fiat settlement—not evidence that Zhang reversed every earlier criticism of crypto.
What Alta proposes to build
Opool Labs describes Alta as a layer-one network intended for banks and licensed payment providers rather than retail crypto users. Co-founder Loong Wang, previously the founder of Ren Protocol, said the team would not have built a new L1 if an existing network met institutions’ requirements. He identified privacy, compliance, integration with local financial systems and liquidity as requirements that existing chains could not satisfy together.
The article says Alta’s design uses recursive zero-knowledge proofs to permit on-chain compliance checks without revealing counterparties’ identities or transaction amounts. It also describes protocol-level programmable compliance, native identity authorization and a mechanism intended to prevent transfers from unauthorized addresses. These are reported design features, not independently demonstrated guarantees of privacy or regulatory acceptance. Another co-founder, Catherine Porter, previously led external partnerships for Meta’s Libra/Diem project and later advised Mysten Labs and Aptos, according to the article.
Airwallex is described as a strategic design partner and potential distribution channel. Opool Labs reports annualized payment volume of $287 billion, annual revenue of $1.3 billion, operations across 200 countries and support for 90 fiat currencies. An existing payment network could help Alta reach institutions, but it does not establish that customers will move core settlement activity onto the chain.
The evidence still needed
The central test is institutional use beyond funding and prospective distribution: which third-party financial institutions integrate Alta, whether meaningful settlement activity follows, and whether fiat redemption remains efficient. Compliance rules also differ across jurisdictions, so a programmable framework alone cannot demonstrate that the network will meet each market’s requirements.
Opool Labs places Alta alongside Stripe’s Tempo and other institutional settlement networks. It cites a stablecoin market capitalization above $320 billion as of mid-2026 and more than $33 trillion in on-chain transaction volume during 2025, but does not name the datasets or measurement methodology behind those figures. They provide context for the article’s thesis, not a valuation input or a measure of Alta’s adoption.
