Loong Wang's Metal startup seed is almost $50 million

The figure missing from June is now in print. On October 4, 2026, the Australian Financial Review reported that the startup Metal, which builds infrastructure for tokenised financial products and stablecoin payments, raised almost $50 million in a seed round jointly led by Airwallex and its venture capital arm, Capital 49. The Review named the co-founders as Loong Wang, a Melbourne-based entrepreneur, and Catherine Porter, a former Meta executive. Loong Wang had already said the round existed. He had not said what it was worth.

That omission is the story. Banks have spent this year attaching tokenised cash to ledgers they already run. A new chain still has to borrow distribution, and Airwallex is the borrow: a design partner, not a buyer. A design-partner seat is not flow. Neither the June 25 posts nor the Review's published lead names a customer balance, a corridor, or a mainnet date.

What Loong Wang put on the record

On June 25, 2026, Loong Wang wrote that a mutual introduction to Airwallex Chief Executive Jack Zhang, six months earlier, began as a stablecoin conversation and widened. "Something that could serve the next era of finance: agents, stablecoins, and tokenized financial products," he wrote. He and Catherine Porter "joined forces as cofounders," and Airwallex and Capital49 "have co-led a seed investment into Metal, with Airwallex joining as our first design partner." He described himself and Zhang as "two fellow Aussies, Melbournites," and called the startup "the foundational infrastructure for tokenized financial products."

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The company site lists Loong Wang as chief executive and Catherine Porter as president. It says he previously founded and exited Ren, the first cross-chain liquidity protocol to pioneer Bitcoin (BTC) on Ethereum (ETH), with $13 billion of volume in the first 12 months, and that Porter was head of partnership and business development at Libra, Meta's blockchain initiative. The pages list tokenised deposits, money-market funds, T-bills, equities and securities, plus stablecoin payments. They say the Airwallex partnership covers local rails in 200 countries and 90 currencies. That is coverage, not a print of money moved.

Zhang, posting the same day, called the startup "a Layer-1 blockchain designed for compliant global settlement at scale" and "purpose built for licensed financial institutions to move and settle stablecoins securely, efficiently, and within regulated global frameworks." He named no round size. Almost $50 million appears in the Review, which also calls Capital 49 Airwallex's venture capital arm. Loong Wang's post spells it Capital49 and does not use that description. The Review does not say whether the dollars are US or Australian. It frames the raise as an Australian-founded business making strides in the United States market.

Incumbent rails are not waiting

Loong Wang points to BlackRock's BUIDL fund, which he says was released for institutions at the end of 2025, and to an HSBC tokenised-deposit pilot he places at the start of 2026. He argues that stablecoins cannot represent deposits, bills, funds and securities. The follow-through has been on other people's plumbing. BlackRock has tokenised 12 money-market share classes on Kinexys. HSBC and Standard Chartered have netted deposit tokens on Swift's ledger. Canada's Big Six tokenised-deposit rail still names no settlement asset. A Partior proof of concept has already settled stablecoins against tokenised deposits. The Metal startup wants to sit under that activity. The activity is being recorded somewhere else.

He also writes that delays often come from a beneficiary institution's anti-money-laundering and fraud checks, and that operators on a private subnet can still see an institution's policy. The company pages add agent payments and embedded distribution, and they do not date a launch. A design partnership lets Airwallex keep client money on rails it already holds. It is a weak reading of the seed as adoption.

What would make the round visible

If distribution arrives, it has to come through Airwallex. The test is a named corridor, a stablecoin or deposit token with a disclosed flow, and a settlement a bank or fund manager can reconcile. Until one of those exists, almost $50 million is the price of an infrastructure option, not evidence that balances have moved. A new Layer 1 does not have to break in public to go unused. Licensed institutions only have to prefer a ledger they already govern. The seed, at the size the Review reported on October 4, does not decide which path the Metal startup is on.

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