Airwallex Invests in Metal: How Stablecoins Reconnect with the Real Financial System?
Airwallex Invests in Metal: How Stablecoins Connect Back to the Real Financial System?
Airwallex, a global financial platform for businesses, has completed a $3.2 billion Series H funding round at an $11 billion valuation. Concurrently, it co-led the seed round for Metal, a "tokenized financial products infrastructure" project, becoming its first design partner.
This move signals Airwallex's strategic shift beyond traditional cross-border payments. It aims to leverage its decade of experience in licenses, local payment networks, and API infrastructure to address a new challenge: facilitating the entry of stablecoins, tokenized assets, and AI agents into enterprise financial systems. This involves handling critical functions like authorization, compliance, currency exchange, fiat on/off-ramps, and final settlement.
Metal positions itself not merely as another stablecoin payment solution but as a compliant settlement layer (Layer 1 blockchain) designed for regulated financial institutions. It targets a broader scope of tokenized financial products, including stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and securities. The core challenge it addresses is connecting efficient on-chain assets with the complex realities of corporate finance, such as multi-currency bank accounts, securities, compliance checks, and local regulations.
Airwallex's investment, alongside its founder-backed fund Capital49, provides Metal with crucial real-world infrastructure: access to local payment networks covering 200+ countries and 90+ currencies. This partnership aims to bridge the gap between on-chain efficiency and off-chain, institution-ready settlement.
The announcement aligns with Airwallex's broader product direction, which includes an AI-native financial platform (T:0) and a wallet infrastructure for AI agent commerce (Airi). The combined vision is an integrated infrastructure that can handle the speed and cost benefits of on-chain assets while seamlessly managing compliance, authorization, and fiat connectivity required for global business operations and the emerging AI agent economy.
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