Airwallex-backed Metal blockchain is building a new product for tokenized assets and compliance-heavy finance.
Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Airwallex, the $11 billion global payments company, is backing Metal, a new Layer-1 blockchain built to bring tokenized assets and compliance-heavy finance on one platform.
Metal is entering a market where stablecoins and tokenized assets are already becoming large financial infrastructure, with RWA.xyz showing more than $32 billion in distributed tokenized asset value.
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The project was announced by Loong Wang, a Melbourne-based founder who said Metal began after he met Zhang and started discussing new financial infrastructure for tokenized products.
Airwallex and Capital49, the venture fund created by Airwallex’s founders, co-led Metal’s seed investment, though the round size wasn’t disclosed.
New L1 for Financial Products
Metal pitches itself as infrastructure for regulated tokenized finance rather than another trading playground, with programmable compliance and privacy tools built into the chain.
The eventual goal is to let banks and other institutions enforce their own rules on-chain without exposing sensitive activity to network operators or relying on isolated private systems.
As Metal argues, no existing chain offers global and scalable fiat on- and off-ramps, which makes it harder for stablecoins and tokenized assets to connect back to regular money.
But Metal’s pitch isn’t happening in isolation as other players are also testing more controlled on-chain environments for regulated finance.
For instance, UBS, a Zurich-based bank, recently completed tests with Nethermind, an Ethereum infrastructure company, on Ethereum’s test network Sepolia, showing that banks can add compliance checks around blockchain transactions even without changing the blockchain itself.
Read more: Bitwise: Financial Advisors Prefer Stablecoins and Tokenization Over Bitcoin
