From harsh criticism of stablecoins to entering the L1 creation: Zhang Shuo from Air Cloud Exchange is not "delicious," but the battle for the settlement layer has begun

Author: Opool Labs

In June 2025, Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang publicly voiced his opinions on social media, causing quite a stir in the crypto space. He openly questioned the actual value of stablecoins in reducing cross-border costs, stating that the costs of converting stablecoins back to fiat currency were much higher than those in traditional interbank foreign exchange markets. He even remarked that cryptocurrencies had not truly solved real-world problems in the fifteen years since their inception.

At that time, Airwallex was valued at $6 billion, holding 80 financial licenses worldwide, operating in 200 countries and regions, and generating annual revenues exceeding $1 billion. As a leading player in the cross-border payment sector, his statements carried significant weight and drew rebuttals from many in the crypto industry. Jack Zhang made only limited concessions, acknowledging that stablecoin wallets had value as alternative payment methods in emerging markets.

Just 17 months later, the situation took a dramatic turn. On November 10, 2026, the blockchain project Alta announced a $47.5 million Series A funding round, adding to a $32.5 million seed round, bringing the total funding to $80 million, led by Index Ventures, with participation from Google Ventures and other institutions. Jack Zhang was surprisingly listed among the co-founders of Alta.

Most outsiders interpreted this as the founder "eating his words," but peeling back the surface reveals that Jack Zhang had not changed his views on ordinary crypto assets; what drove him to participate was not a belief in crypto but rather the logic of business survival. A competition around the settlement layer of stablecoins has fully commenced, and if payment giants do not engage, they risk becoming mere ordinary interfaces for upper-layer applications in the future.

What is Alta Really About: Not a General Public Chain, but a Compliant L1 Serving Licensed Institutions

Many people easily misunderstand that Alta aims to create a competitive public chain for ordinary crypto users; the reality is quite the opposite. Alta is positioned as a Layer 1 public chain aimed at banks and licensed payment institutions, with its target clientele from the very beginning being traditional financial institutions, not retail traders.

Project co-founder Loong Wang, who previously founded the well-known DeFi project Ren Protocol, stated that if there were a mature network that could meet all institutional demands, the team would not choose to develop a Layer 1 public chain from scratch. Existing public chains like Ethereum and Solana cannot simultaneously satisfy traditional institutions' four rigid standards: privacy, strong compliance, integration with local financial systems, and liquidity assurance. This is the core motivation for building their own infrastructure.

On the technical side, Alta employs a recursive zero-knowledge proof architecture, achieving a crucial capability: transactions can complete compliance checks on-chain without exposing the identities of the transacting parties or the transaction amounts, balancing regulatory scrutiny with institutional trading privacy. The product design incorporates many anti-crypto-native features: the protocol layer directly embeds programmable compliance modules, a native identity authorization system, and even adds an anti-airdrop mechanism, preventing unauthorized addresses from initiating transfers to users, addressing the issue of malicious asset harassment that banks are particularly wary of.

The team configuration also points towards a traditional financial collaboration route. Another co-founder, Catherine Porter, previously led external collaborations for Libra (Diem) at Meta and later served as an advisor at Mysten Labs and Aptos, possessing extensive experience in collaborating with traditional financial institutions.

Jack Zhang's understanding of stablecoins has also moved beyond the old framework of "cheap cross-border remittance tools." In his view, exchanging local currency for dollar-pegged stablecoins is essentially a foreign exchange transaction; as the scale expands, stablecoins are developing into an independent dollar liquidity market, possessing their own quotes and spreads, and will interact with traditional foreign exchange markets. The real long-term opportunity lies in the programmable nature of money: stablecoins turn funds into software components, enabling automated fund management and multi-party collaborative settlements, providing infrastructure support for future AI autonomous trading.

Airwallex's Ace: $80 Million Backed by a Channel of Million-Dollar Enterprise Clients

Alta's greatest advantage does not solely stem from the $80 million funding but from the ready-made network resources brought by its strategic partner, Airwallex.

Airwallex is not just a financial investor but also a core design partner and distribution engine for Alta. This cross-border payment giant has an annual transaction volume of $287 billion and annual revenue of $1.3 billion, operating in 200 countries and supporting 90 fiat currencies. In the future, Alta's underlying chain will directly connect to Airwallex's payment tracks, channeling the platform's vast enterprise clients to this new public chain, a starting condition that most new public chain startups find hard to reach.

Insiders express it more bluntly: Jack Zhang has not become a crypto believer; rather, the continuous rise in market demand from clients, combined with the gradual clarification of global stablecoin regulatory frameworks, has led the company to choose to integrate this on-chain settlement technology into its business landscape.

It is essential to clarify the internal consistency of the viewpoints: what Jack Zhang criticized back then was "relying on stablecoins to reduce ordinary cross-border exchange fees"; now, what he is betting on is the on-chain settlement infrastructure for tokenized fiat currencies. Within his framework, stablecoins do not belong to speculative crypto assets but represent a new form of fiat currency on-chain. Criticizing speculative narratives while embracing compliant tokenized settlements are not contradictory.

Stripe Has Already Taken the Lead; An Industry Arms Race Has Begun

The direct pressure prompting Airwallex to decisively enter the fray comes from its direct competitor Stripe's full-stack layout.

Stripe has completed the construction of a complete technical stack for stablecoins: in October 2024, it spent $1.1 billion to acquire the stablecoin issuance infrastructure company Bridge; by the end of 2025, it acquired the wallet service provider Privy, holding 75 million embedded wallet resources; in 2026, it partnered with Paradigm to incubate the payment-specific public chain Tempo, raising $500 million and achieving a valuation of $5 billion, completing its mainnet launch in March.

The division of labor among the three is clear: Bridge is responsible for stablecoin minting and redemption, and withdrawal channels; Privy provides embedded wallets; Tempo handles the underlying settlement, allowing the entire chain to operate independently of external public chains. OpenAI, Shopify, Deutsche Bank, and Visa have all become partners of Tempo, and as of November 2026, over 100 services have completed integration. Stripe has publicly stated its goal to become the "AWS of the currency domain."

If Airwallex does not make its move, when stablecoin settlements become standard for corporate cross-border operations, its vast payment network will only be able to operate on its competitors' chains, becoming a dependent application interface, losing its voice in infrastructure. Alta is the key chip for Airwallex to respond to this competition.

Looking across the entire sector, creating chains is no longer an isolated case; numerous players are targeting the institutional-level on-chain settlement track:

• Circle launched the Arc network to serve USDC institutional cross-chain settlements;

• Fireblocks built a global stablecoin network, connecting withdrawal, liquidity, and compliance service providers;

• Canton Network, supported by Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and BNP Paribas, focuses on tokenized asset clearing for licensed financial institutions.

The stablecoin market size has already sufficiently validated the value of this sector; by mid-2026, the total market capitalization of stablecoins surpassed $320 billion, with USDT accounting for 59% (approximately $187 billion) and USDC for 24% (approximately $75 billion). The total on-chain transaction volume for 2025 exceeded $33 trillion, with USDC transaction volume at $18.3 trillion, surpassing USDT's $13.3 trillion.

However, market capitalization and transaction volume are merely surface indicators; the real focus of the competition lies in the settlement layer. Whoever controls the complete process of stablecoin minting, on-chain clearing, and fiat redemption will hold the pricing power of the next generation of financial infrastructure.

In This War, Technology Is Just a Supporting Role; Network and Compliance Are the Deciding Factors

Many in the crypto community tend to judge a public chain's success or failure based on TPS and cryptographic innovations, but for financial-specific L1s like Alta and Tempo, technical performance is merely a ticket to entry; what truly determines life and death are three factors.

First, the genuine willingness of traditional financial institutions to adopt. The value of an institutional public chain does not lie in how cool the technology is, but in how many banks and enterprises are willing to migrate their business. Although Alta inherits Airwallex's customer resources, there remains significant uncertainty about whether these enterprises will truly migrate their core settlement operations. Institutions find it easy to pilot new technologies but are extremely cautious about migrating core funding routes.

Second, the ability to adapt to compliance across multiple jurisdictions globally. The biggest selling point of such institutional chains is the built-in compliance at the protocol layer, but regulatory policies vary greatly across countries. Whether programmable compliance can adapt to different countries' anti-money laundering and identity verification rules is a significant test. If the regulatory stance of a major jurisdiction shifts, the entire design's value will be greatly diminished.

Third, the efficiency of integration between on-chain and real-world banking systems. The ultimate value of stablecoins lies in their ability to be seamlessly converted back to fiat currency. Regardless of how fast on-chain settlements are, if the costs and efficiency of withdrawal channels are high, it will revisit the pain points that Jack Zhang initially criticized about stablecoins. On-chain is only half of the equation; the off-chain fiat track is the indispensable other half.

We can also observe an interesting paradigm shift in the industry: in the past, the blockchain industry often discussed disrupting traditional finance; now, traditional fintech giants like Stripe and Airwallex are entering the fray with a completely different mindset—not to disrupt banks but to create a set of infrastructure that encourages traditional finance to voluntarily come on-chain.

Faith is no longer important; pragmatism is now dominating the entire sector.

Final Thoughts

Jack Zhang's transition from publicly questioning stablecoins to co-founding Alta does not represent a 180-degree reversal of personal stance but rather an iteration of the industry paradigm. The early market often viewed stablecoins as cheap remittance tools, but now the industry sees a larger picture: stablecoins are programmable monetary vehicles aimed at corporate treasury management, multi-party clearing, and AI autonomous trading in a new financial landscape.

Of course, entering the market does not equate to victory. The $80 million funding and built-in customer channels only secure a ticket to the competition. Alta will soon face fierce competition from Stripe Tempo and various institutional settlement networks. In the future, to assess Alta's success or failure, one should not look at the scale of funding or technical white papers but rather at how many third-party financial institutions genuinely integrate and how much real business operates on this chain.

The curtain on the settlement layer has just been raised; in the coming years, the integration of traditional finance and the crypto world will not take place in retail trading but here.