Airwallex founder "slaps his own face": from raging against stablecoins to building his own chain

Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang, who publicly dismissed stablecoins as recently as June 2025, has co-founded Alta, an L1 blockchain for licensed financial institutions, which announced a $47.5 million Series A led by Index Ventures with participation from GV, Blackbird Ventures and Square Peg, bringing total funding to $80 million including a prior $32.5 million seed round. Alta is built on recursive zero-knowledge cryptography with a built-in programmable compliance layer, embedded identity and authorization, and anti-airdrop controls, aiming to provide the privacy and regulatory compliance that Zhang and co-founder Loong Wang argue Ethereum, Solana and L2s cannot. Airwallex, which has roughly $1.3 billion in annual revenue and $287 billion in annualized transaction volume across 200 countries and 90 currencies, is acting as Alta's distribution channel and design partner, connecting the chain to local fiat rails. The pivot follows Stripe's $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge, its Privy wallet deal and the Tempo payments chain, which raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation and launched mainnet in March 2026 with over 100 integrations. The move matters because a payments incumbent with global licensing is now backing stablecoin settlement infrastructure directly, and the next test is whether Airwallex's client base actually routes volume onto Alta.