Alta co-founders Loong Wang and Catherine Porter
We’ve known Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Airwallex, for around a decade, and his leadership and resilience have inspired us for much of that time. A recommendation from Jack isn’t one you take lightly, so when he told us we had to meet Loong Wang, we listened. Loong had already built and sold Ren, a successful blockchain company, and had chosen to turn to stablecoins because he saw how badly banks needed better infrastructure.
On any given day, Loong estimates roughly $1.5 trillion in US dollars is in flight – sent but not yet received. At the risk-free interest rate, that’s about $56 billion in lost interest every year, before counting any other currencies. The delay is worse across borders, where money is channelled via multiple local intermediaries, each with their own compliance checks and cutoffs. Several startups have managed to make all this appear instant by keeping pots of cash in local accounts, paying out to the end user from the closest one, and then rebalancing behind the scenes. But in reality they’re plastering over the problem, because they still rely on the same faulty pipework as everyone else.
Loong’s vision is a financial system that transacts and communicates instantly and continuously. To get there, he started Alta: a next-generation payments network that uses stablecoins – digital currencies pegged one-to-one to real-world money – to let regulated banks move money and assets near-instantly, across nearly 200 countries and 90 currencies. We’re thrilled to be leading the Series A for Loong and his co-founders: Catherine Porter, who was part of the leadership team behind Meta’s digital payment network, and Jack himself.
So how does Alta work? Stablecoins run on blockchains, which offer a fix: a shared record that everyone can trust without relying on a middleman, where money can move automatically and carry rules about how it can be used. But banks couldn’t use blockchains as they were: crypto was built as an alternative to banks, not a complement to them. Most blockchains make everything public and can’t block or reverse a payment, which doesn’t work when banks must protect their clients’ privacy and prove they won’t accept money from sanctioned entities. And there were no regulations giving institutions permission to try.
The regulatory picture changed in 2025, when the US passed the GENIUS Act, which set clear rules around what banks could do with stablecoins. That left the technical problem. The question for Alta was: can you build a stablecoin ledger where everyone agrees a transaction is valid, and can audit it, while nobody except the two parties can see what it was? Through what Loong describes as “a very complicated game of Sudoku,” it turns out the answer is yes. Alta doesn’t create its own currency, but uses a stablecoin blockchain to keep a shared record that banks can trust, without exposing their customers’ data.
On Alta, institutions can also refuse or refund money, and a bank’s rules travel with whatever it’s sending. Sanctions screening, regulatory checks and specific policies about who you will and won’t do business with become part of the transaction itself, rather than a separate gate the money has to wait at. This means payments are not only faster, but more reliable. It also prepares the ground for a world in which AI agents transact on humans’ behalf. A merchant needs to know that an agent truly has the authority it claims to move or spend money, while a regulator needs to trace it back to a real person or entity without exposing who they are. Alta can do both.
We believe Alta could free up huge amounts of cash in the global economy that’s currently stuck in transit, and we’re excited to be backing Loong, Catherine and Jack.
Published — Nov. 10, 2026
