Loong WangI was sitting at a cafe in Melbourne, with my brother Bjorn, trying to explain Alta to him. An everyday kid with zero interest in finance.
Suddenly his phone lit up: “Loong has transferred you $240.” But I hadn’t. I had been sitting right there across from him talking nonsense. Something about 1:1 reserves and overnight interest rates.
It turns out it was a transfer from four days prior. But why did it take so long? Well, it was Easter. Friday and Monday were public holidays. So he didn’t get the transfer until Tuesday.
A thought struck me. “How did you pay for the physio?” He had broken his shoulder earlier in the year, and I’d been helping pay for his therapy sessions.
“I didn’t go.”
An Australian transferring Australian dollars to another Australian. From one major Australian bank to another. As a regular recurring transfer that has been happening every Friday, like clockwork, for months. And yet, an unexpected four-day delay, resulting in real-world consequences. Consequences for someone who doesn’t think twice about stablecoins or tokenized funds.
What if it had been for food or rent?
It’s easy to throw big numbers around like “$4T of trapped cash”, “$1.4T of exposed counterparty risk”, or “$135B in wasted operational costs” and forget that there’s a real cost to inefficiency, beyond the cost in dollars.
As it turns out, there was no better explanation of Alta than what was happening right in front of us as we drank our batch brews. That surprise transfer coming through on a Tuesday instead of a Friday? Alta is fixing that.
More accurately, Alta is fixing the legacy global financial system of which these kinds of delays are but one symptom.
Today, we are announcing $80M in funding from world-class investors that are backing us on this mission.
The global financial system has hardly changed in decades. It is slow. It is inefficient. It is a patchwork of nostro/vostro bank accounts, money pools, and independently reconciled ledgers. And — without everyday people even realising it — it affects every single one of our lives.
With this funding, Alta will be taking on some of the hardest problems in global finance. Starting with the infrastructure necessary to optimise financial institutions and corporate treasuries.
We are building real-time FX systems, with tighter spreads, lower prefunding, faster settlement, and better counterparty risk/compliance controls.
We are building real-time cross-border payment systems, powered by FX, allowing institutions and businesses to efficiently send payments from one country to another, one currency to another.
We are building real-time yield systems, where capital can be instantly deployed into value-accruing assets, and instantly redeemed. With cheap enough microtransactions that returns can be accessed second-by-second.
Most critically, compliance and privacy are built into every layer and every transaction. On Alta, it is impossible for a transaction — whether it is a payment, delivery, trade, investment, or a drawing down of credit — to be executed if it is not fully compliant with the requirements of all parties, proven to the entire world beyond a mathematical doubt, without revealing a single bit of information.
Our mission is to optimise every layer of the global financial system. Not only payments, but also FX, investment, credit, trade, and beyond.
There is no physical or mathematical law that prevents finance from operating 24/7/365 with sub-second latency and sub-cent overhead.
But to do so requires frontier blockchain technology that makes no compromise on the privacy and compliance needs of global businesses and financial institutions.
It requires technology that can — with the finest level of control — screen counterparties, verify authorizations, and trace source of funds, without disclosing sensitive information.
It requires technology that can scale to the millions of transactions per second, and the millions of ephemeral identities, that will be brought on by the incoming era of agents.
It requires global connectivity into every country, every local payment method, and every blockchain, unifying tokenized and traditional infrastructure.
It requires Alta.
And then, finally, I’ll be able to send my brother some dollaridoos.