Banks looking to move money on a blockchain have plenty of options. Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche are all available and actively courting financial firms.
Alta believes they need another option. The startup has raised $47.5 million in a Series A round to build a Layer 1 blockchain designed with compliance at its core.
Index Ventures led the round, which Alta announced Tuesday. The company did not disclose its valuation.
Who’s writing the checks
Index Ventures was joined by GV, the venture arm formerly known as Google Ventures, as well as Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg and Capital49.
The Series A follows a $32.5 million seed round. Airwallex, the Australian fintech that competes with Stripe and others in payments, was the main backer, with Capital49 also participating.
Together, the two rounds have brought Alta’s total funding to approximately $80 million.
What Alta is actually building
Alta’s pitch is built around a plug-and-play compliance layer that customers can use to check whether their transactions comply with rules and regulations in any jurisdiction.
The company calls this programmable compliance: policies are enforced automatically at the protocol level. Instead of checking rules after a transaction, the blockchain is designed to apply them during processing.
Alta combines this with privacy controls, which tend to be a major concern for institutions. The blockchain is also designed to connect to real-world payment rails. Alta says it supports payments in more than 200 countries and 90 currencies.
Its target use cases are distinctly institutional:
- Tokenized deposits, or bank deposits represented as digital tokens on a blockchain
- Real-time foreign exchange, enabling currency conversion without the usual settlement delay
- Cross-border payments, a slow and costly part of finance that crypto has long promised to improve
- Integrated yield systems, allowing money to earn a return while held on the network
The founders behind it
Alta was co-founded by Loong Wang and Catherine Porter. Wang has a background in crypto startups.
Porter previously worked as a Meta executive on the social media giant’s crypto initiatives.
Why another blockchain, and why now
Alta is betting that speed and cost are not banks’ main obstacles. It sees compliance as the barrier.
Institutions on general-purpose networks typically have to add compliance tools on top. Alta reverses that approach, building compliance in as a native layer rather than an add-on.
The Airwallex connection is notable. A global payments company backing Alta’s seed round gives the startup a direct view of how cross-border money movement works in practice and where it breaks down.
Source: cryptobriefing.com. Adapted by NBTC.
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