Author: Opool Labs
In June 2025, Jack Zhang, CEO of Airwallex, made a public statement on social media, sparking considerable discussion within the crypto community. He openly questioned the actual value of stablecoins in reducing cross-border costs, stating that the costs of converting stablecoins back to fiat currency far exceed those of the traditional interbank foreign exchange market, and even asserted that cryptocurrency has not genuinely solved any real-world problems in the past fifteen years.
At that time, AirCloud's valuation reached $6 billion, holding 80 financial licenses worldwide, operating in 200 countries and regions, and achieving annual revenue exceeding $1 billion. As a leading player in the cross-border payments sector, this statement carried significant weight and drew strong rebuttals from many professionals in the crypto industry. Zhang Shuo made only limited concessions, acknowledging that stablecoin wallets possess value as an alternative payment method in emerging markets.
Just 17 months later, the story has taken a dramatic turn. On November 10, 2026, the blockchain project Alta announced a $47.5 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised capital to $80 million when combined with its $32.5 million seed round. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from GV (Google Ventures) and other institutions, and Zhang Shuo is prominently listed as a co-founder of Alta.
Most outsiders simplistically interpret this as the founder âeating his words,â but looking beyond the surface, Zhang Shuo has not changed his view of general crypto assets; what drives him to act is not crypto ideology, but business survival logic. A full-scale competition over the settlement layer for stablecoins has already begunâif payment giants remain absent, they risk becoming mere generic interfaces for upper-layer applications.
What Alta is truly about: Not a general-purpose public chain, but a compliant L1 designed for licensed institutions.
Many people mistakenly believe that Alta aims to build a competing public blockchain for general crypto users; in fact, the opposite is true. Alta is positioned as a Layer 1 public blockchain designed for banks and licensed payment institutions, with its target audience being traditional financial institutions from the outset, not retail traders.
Co-founder Loong Wang, who previously founded the well-known DeFi project Ren Protocol, stated that if an existing network could meet all institutional requirements, the team would never have chosen to build a new L1 blockchain from scratch. Existing blockchains like Ethereum and Solana cannot simultaneously satisfy four critical institutional demandsâprivacy, strict compliance, integration with local financial systems, and liquidity assuranceâmaking the development of their ownćșć± the core motivation.
On the technical side, Alta adopts a recursive zero-knowledge proof architecture to enable a critical capability: compliance verification can be performed on-chain without exposing the identities of the transacting parties or the transaction amount, balancing regulatory oversight with institutional transaction privacy. In terms of product design, it incorporates numerous anti-crypto-native features: programmable compliance modules are natively built into the protocol layer, along with a native identity authorization system, and even an anti-airdrop mechanism that prevents unauthorized addresses from initiating transfers to users, addressing the serious concern of malicious asset harassment that banks and institutions deeply fear.
The team configuration also aligns with a traditional finance partnership approach. Another co-founder, Catherine Porter, previously led Libra (Diem)âs external partnerships at Meta and later served as an advisor to Mysten Labs and Aptos, bringing extensive experience in collaborating with traditional financial institutions.
Zhang Shuoâs understanding of stablecoins has moved beyond the old framework of âa cheap tool for cross-border remittances.â In his view, exchanging local currency for USD stablecoins is essentially a foreign exchange transaction; as scale grows, stablecoins are developing an independent USD liquidity market with their own pricing and spreads, while interacting with traditional foreign exchange markets. The true long-term opportunity lies in the programmability of money: stablecoins turn funds into software components, enabling automated fund management and multi-party coordinated settlement, providing infrastructure support for future autonomous AI agent trading.
Kongzhong Cloud's hidden advantage: 80 million U.S. dollars backed by a channel of millions of enterprise customers
Alta's greatest advantage does not come solely from its $80 million funding, but from the existing network resources brought by its strategic partner, Airwallex.
Airwallex is not merely a financial investor but also Altaâs core design partner and distribution engine. This global payments giant processes $287 billion in annual transaction volume, generates $1.3 billion in annual revenue, operates in 200 countries, and supports 90 fiat currencies. In the future, Altaâs underlying blockchain will directly integrate with Airwallexâs payment rails, directing its vast enterprise customer base to this new public chainâan initial advantage that most new blockchain startup projects cannot match.
An insider put it more bluntly: Zhang Shuo didnât become a crypto believer; rather, with ongoing market demand and a gradually clearer global regulatory framework for stablecoins, the company chose to integrate this on-chain settlement technology into its business portfolio.
It is important to clarify the internal consistency of these opposing views: back then, Zhang Shuo criticized the idea of âusing stablecoins to reduce ordinary cross-border exchange feesâ; now, he is betting on blockchain-based settlement infrastructure for tokenized fiat currency. Within his framework, stablecoins are not crypto speculative assets, but rather a new on-chain form of fiat currency. Criticizing speculative narratives and embracing compliant tokenized settlement are not contradictory.
Stripe has taken the lead, and the industry's arms race has begun.
The direct pressure driving Airwallex to decisively enter the market came from its competitor Stripe's full-stack approach.
Stripe has built a complete technical stack for stablecoins: In October 2024, it acquired Bridge, a stablecoin issuance infrastructure company, for $1.1 billion; by the end of 2025, it acquired the wallet service provider Privy, gaining access to 75 million embedded wallets; in 2026, it partnered with Paradigm to incubate Tempo, a payment-focused blockchain, raising $500 million with a $5 billion valuation, and successfully launched its mainnet in March.
The roles are clearly divided: Bridge handles stablecoin minting and redemption, as well as withdrawal channels; Privy provides embedded wallets; and Tempo manages underlying settlementâenabling the entire system to operate independently of external blockchains. OpenAI, Shopify, Deutsche Bank, and Visa have all become Tempo partners; as of November 2026, over 100 services have been integrated. Stripe has publicly stated its goal to become the "AWS of money."
If AirCloud does not make strategic moves now, when stablecoin settlement becomes a standard for enterprise cross-border business, its extensive payment network will be forced to operate on competitorsâ blockchains, reducing it to a dependent application interface and losing control over infrastructureèŻèŻæ. Alta is AirCloudâs key countermeasure in this competition.
Across the entire sector, chain creation is no longer an isolated caseâmany players are targeting the institutional-grade on-chain settlement space:
Circle launches the Arc network to enable institutional USDC cross-chain settlement;
Fireblocks builds a global stablecoin network, connecting withdrawals, liquidity, and compliance providers;
Canton Network, backed by Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and BNP Paribas, focuses on settlement of tokenized assets for regulated financial institutions.
Circle launches the Arc network to enable institutional USDC cross-chain settlement;
Fireblocks builds a global stablecoin network, connecting withdrawals, liquidity, and compliance providers;
Canton Network, backed by Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and BNP Paribas, focuses on settlement of tokenized assets for regulated financial institutions.
The stablecoin market has sufficiently validated its sector value: by mid-2026, the total market capitalization of stablecoins surpassed $320 billion, with USDT accounting for 59%, or approximately $187 billion, and USDC accounting for 24%, or approximately $75 billion. In 2025, the total on-chain transaction volume exceeded $33 trillion, with USDCâs transaction volume reaching $18.3 trillion, surpassing USDTâs $13.3 trillion.
But market capitalization and trading volume are merely surface-level metrics; the real battleground lies in the settlement layer. Whoever controls the complete process of stablecoin minting, on-chain settlement, and fiat redemption holds the pricing power over the next-generation financial infrastructure.
Technology is merely a supporting role; the network and compliance are the deciding factors.
Many crypto communities judge the success of a public blockchain based on TPS and cryptographic innovations, but for financial-purpose L1s like Alta and Tempo, technical performance is merely the entry ticketâthe true determinants of survival are three key factors.
First, the genuine willingness of traditional financial institutions to adopt. The value of institutional blockchains does not lie in how advanced the technology is, but in how many banks and enterprises are willing to migrate their operations. Although Alta inherits the customer base of Airwallex, there remains significant uncertainty as to whether these enterprises will actually migrate their core settlement processes onto the platform. Institutions are quick to pilot technologies, but they approach the migration of core financial workflows with extreme caution.
Second, the ability to comply with regulations across multiple global jurisdictions. The key selling point of these institutional chains is built-in compliance at the protocol level; however, regulatory policies vary significantly between countries. Whether programmable compliance can adapt to differing anti-money laundering and identity verification rules in various nations presents a major challenge. If the regulatory stance of any major jurisdiction shifts, the entire designâs value could be significantly diminished.
Third, the efficiency of connecting on-chain systems with traditional banking systems. The ultimate value of stablecoins lies in their ability to seamlessly convert back to fiat currency. No matter how fast on-chain settlements are, if withdrawal channels are costly and inefficient, the same pain points that Zhang Shuo originally criticized in stablecoins will resurface. On-chain infrastructure is only half the equation; the off-chain fiat rails are the indispensable other half.
We can also observe an interesting industry paradigm shift: previously, the blockchain industry was always focused on disrupting traditional finance; now, traditional fintech giants like Stripe and Airwallex are entering the space with a completely different approachânot seeking to overthrow banks, but instead building infrastructure that encourages traditional finance to voluntarily move onto the chain.
Belief is no longer important; pragmatism is now dominating the entire industry.
In conclusion
Zhang Shuoâs journey from publicly questioning stablecoins to co-founding Alta was not a 180-degree reversal of personal stance, but rather a reflection of an evolving industry paradigm. Early markets viewed stablecoins primarily as low-cost remittance tools, but today the industry sees a broader vision: stablecoins as programmable monetary vehicles enabling a new financial infrastructure for corporate treasury management, multi-party settlement, and AI agent transactions.
Of course, entering the game doesnât mean winning. An $80 million funding round and built-in customer channels only get you a seat at the table. Alta now faces intense competition from Stripe Tempo and numerous institutional settlement networks. To judge Altaâs success in the future, donât look at funding size or technical whitepapersâlook at how many third-party financial institutions have genuinely integrated and how much real business is running on this chain.
The curtain has just risen on the settlement layer; over the coming years, the primary battlefield for the convergence of traditional finance and the crypto world will not be retail trading, but here.
