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The world's financial system still runs on a patchwork. A payment that crosses a border passes through a chain of correspondent banks, moves in batches, takes days to land and can fail at any step. So institutions park money in advance to be sure it's where it needs to be, across every jurisdiction and payment network they operate in. An estimated US$4 trillion sits in pre-funded accounts around the world, earning nothing, waiting.
A handful of companies have solved this for their own customers, and Airwallex is a great example: a decade spent assembling licences and local accounts around the world so that its customers' money skips the correspondent chain and settles the same day.It's a great solve, but a private one. It works for one company's customers, it took a decade to build, and almost nobody else can repeat it. What the industry needs is that experience as shared infrastructure, open to every institution, without each one having to build its own Airwallex.
Stablecoins and tokenised assets, moving on a shared ledger, make that possible, creating money and financial products that settle instantly, around the clock, and can be programmed. Regulation has caught up too. The GENIUS Act gives US dollar stablecoins their first federal framework, taking them from theoretical to possible….but the ledgers that exist were built for crypto, not for a bank. A regulated institution needs to know who it's transacting with, to control where its money can move, to keep its positions and its clients' confidential, and to meet bank-grade operational standards. It also needs a way into local currency, which no stablecoin chain has had outside the crypto world. That's the gap Alta is built for.
Introducing Alta
Alta is a layer-1 blockchain built for regulated financial institutions to settle stablecoins and tokenised assets. Think deposits, money-market funds, securities, and beyond.
It lets an institution keep its balances, transactions, identities and compliance policies private while proving to the network that every transaction meets the rules. Compliance is programmable and enforced on-chain: who you can transact with, where money can move, what you'll accept and from whom. Identity and authorisation are built in natively, not bolted on as an afterthought.
Airwallex is Alta's first design partner. It's building on the network and connecting its payments infrastructure, enabling stablecoin pay-ins and pay-outs and giving Alta connectivity to local fiat rails across 200 countries and 90 currencies from day one. Alta is also working with several other strategic partners so that the network is neutral from the start - infrastructure that banks, payment companies and other institutions can build on, on the same terms.
The Team
Three things have to come together for a network like this to work: the tech, the regulation and the distribution. Plenty of teams have one of them. Alta have all three & that’s in large part due to the team.
Loong brings the tech. He studied computer science and distributed systems at ANU and in 2017 co-founded Ren, which pioneered bridging Bitcoin onto Ethereum at scale and handled more than US$13B of volume in its first 18 months, before it was acquired in 2021. Then, seeking an even harder problem, he co-founded QDX, a quantum-chemistry software company for drug discovery, where the team ran what was then the largest supercomputing calculation in history, and a cancer drug QDX helped design is now in human trials. He came back to blockchains because the problem he'd run into at Ren, that institutions still had no chain they could actually use, hadn't gone away.
Catherine brings the regulation and the partnerships. A former Meta VP, she ran partnerships and business development for Libra, Meta's stablecoin project, and spent four years at the regulatory front line of stablecoin design, from G7 central-bank engagement to global licensing strategy. Few people have spent more time in the room with the regulators and banks shaping the future of payments.
Together they are a formidable duo - with the technical rigour, drive and clear-eyed view on what success will take.
What's next
It’s a big journey ahead - taking the network live with the first design partners, shipping the initial product, bringing more banks, payment companies and issuers onto the network, and growing the engineering and compliance teams. As Loong puts it, improve the efficiency of the global financial system by a single percent and you've built a trillion-dollar company. We think Alta has the team, the timing and the partners to get there.
We're proud to be backing Loong, Catherine and the Alta team on the journey - on their path to another Australian fintech success story.
