On April 20th, The European Parliament approved the first comprehensive crypto regulation EU-wide, the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA). In the same day, a separate law, the Transfer of Funds regulation, was passed, requiring crypto operators to confirm the identity of their customers in order to halt money laundering transactions.
While the crypto regulation worldwide is becoming increasingly strict, Alchemy Pay is rapidly growing and rising in the cryptocurrency payment field as a payment solution provider bridging global fiat and cryptocurrencies for users in 173 countries. All these achievements started from a forward-looking insight about the revolutionary potential of crypto – the team believe that by creating a seamless gateway between traditional finance and crypto assets, they can make the emerging technology more widely available and provide easier access to financial services for businesses and individuals in different countries and regions.
Currently, it has established solid partnerships with international payment channels such as Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Diners Clubs, Google Pay, Apple Pay and hundreds of local payment channels, and is gradually expanding a larger network of partners.
Recently, Shawn Shi, the founder of Alchemy Pay, was selected as one of the “2022 Forbes China Web 3.0 Innovation Pioneers”. At the same time, Alchemy Pay has established a brand benchmark for its professionalism, trustworthiness and accessibility as a professional and serious payment solution provider that is bridging the gap between fiat and cryptocurrencies in the global economies.
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Dedicated for Five Years to Provide Mainstream Friendly Crypto Payment Solution
In 2017, Alchemy Pay project was built and launched by a team of payments experts who had come from years of experience in Singapore, America, Europe with the likes of HSBC, Mastercard, Paypal, and Visa. A year later, the Alchemy Pay team followed up with Crypto Payment, the world’s first hybrid payment merchant acceptance system that allows merchants to accept payments in both cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies from their customers. “This is the equivalent of a ‘hands off’ system.” Robert McCracken, the head of the Alchemy Pay ecosystem explained, “We accept cryptocurrency payments on behalf of merchants and convert them to fiat currency for settlement in the merchant’s local fiat currency.”
From there, the services offered by Alchemy Pay have gradually expanded in four main directions, including on-ramp, off-ramp, NFT checkout and cryptocurrency payment acceptance systems, bringing forward a diverse range of solutions, while maintaining some convergence and crossover between the four segments.
“On & Off-ramp is our payment solution.” Robert explained in the interview, “On-ramp is deployed as a plugin that the Web3 platform can host on their website so that users can use legal payment methods such as Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay, local bank transfers and commonly used local digital wallets to securely purchase cryptocurrencies. Off-ramp is also a feature of the plugin that operates in a reverse manner, allowing users to sell their cryptocurrency into fiat currency and send the funds directly to their personal bank account, which makes it very easy, straightforward, secure and compliant for users to buy and sell cryptocurrency. NFT checkout is a relatively new solution, with the ability to easily purchase NFT using fiat currency payment methods. This is an easier and more straightforward way for both crypto native and users unfamiliar with Web3.”
After more than five years of development, Alchemy Pay has gained more experience than any other project in the cryptocurrency payments industry – it pinpoints the needs of cryptocurrency-native users, constantly updates and iterates the service, and comes up with solutions with mainstream-friendly usability. Alchemy Pay is available almost anywhere in the world for people of all technical backgrounds, which has built the platform’s barriers within the crypto payments field.
In its first years of development, Alchemy Pay focused on the Asian market, and gradually expanded to Europe and the Americas. By 2021, Alchemy Pay has established payment touchpoints with over 2 million merchants in 70+ countries worldwide. In the last year, Alchemy Pay has focused its business on expanding its global network of payment and remittance partners, partnering with more exchanges and mainstream blockchain networks, and moving towards providing direct-to-customer (D2C) payment solutions.
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Put Vision Into Global, Root in the Local
As the business continues to expand, Alchemy Pay has developed into a truly worldwide organization. At the same time, the team found that constructing a strict hierarchical structure may stifle creativity and productivity and limit the organization’s growth.
As a result, at the end of 2022, Alchemy Pay implemented an “Advisory Board Management System”, inviting global experts to take charge of different departments such as compliance, product, security, etc., where they can participate in decision-making, provide more professional advice and focus their talents on areas where they can achieve their true potential. “Because one person can’t be proficient in everything, we have implemented a committee based advisory and management system.” When asked about the original reason for the system, Robert explained, “We thought a decentralized structure would allow our team to thrive and grow healthily. This setup has been very successful in allowing a real sense of team collaboration to occur.”
David Plouffe, the former White House Senior Advisor and legendary campaign manager, has also recently chosen to join Alchemy Pay and served as a committee member of Alchemy Pay’s management and advisory board, and is responsible for strategy, compliance, and government relations as a global strategic advisor. Plouffe is credited with the strategy and grass-roots public engagement savvy that won Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. After his work for Obama, Plouffe became the Senior Vice President of Policy and Strategy for Uber, and in 2022 Plouffe joined the Binance Global Advisory Board.
Currently, Alchemy Pay has core talents and expert leaders in all departments. Ethan Wang has been a driving force for the tech team, he is the tech lead in Google Cloud Web3 team and one of the founding team members. He also formerly worked for Facebook Libra as a tech lead and founding team member; Andy Ng has over 20 years of experience deep-diving in product; Jonas Cernius head up the compliance team from Europe, for he has over 10 years of combined experience in civil service and finance compliance and has extensive experience in legal operations. Robert said, “We welcome talented people from around the world to join us and build Alchemy Pay with us!”
By building a group of talents with its roots in the local market, Alchemy Pay is putting more emphasis on local payments, making it easier and faster for local users to use the payment services it offers. Alchemy Pay has a significant advantage in the industry in terms of local payments, for it currently supports 300+ local payment channels such as OVO and DANA in Indonesia, GCash in the Philippines and many more. At the same time, this team model has allowed Alchemy Pay to gain an advantage in global policy and compliance, “Any changes in the global regional regulatory environment are important to us and can lead to changes and trends in the payments space, so we will keep a watchful eye to catch the latest trends and changes.” Robert said.
In recent years, Alchemy Pay has seen the potential for demand for cryptocurrencies in South East Asia and Latin America, tailoring its payment solutions and focusing its marketing efforts on these regions, developing operational strategies to promote its products in line with local market conditions. Alchemy Pay has also built a strong reputation and competitiveness for its products by partnering with celebrities and notable organizations to promote its payment products and expand brand local presence.
“Our mission is to bridge the fiat and crypto global economies.” Talking about Alchemy Pay’s long-term vision, Robert expressed the team’s desire to create a sustainable and evolutionary project that solves the problems of connecting the world of traditional finance to the world of cryptocurrencies.
He concluded Alchemy Pay’s mission and vision:“Our ultimate goal is to make it easy for people worldwide to use and access a more decentralized, open, and fair form of finance. We want Alchemy Pay to represent a crypto payment solution that stands the test of time and values users’ feedback. To achieve this, we will focus on refining and improving our product while adopting a long-termist mentality to meet the long term needs of our users.”
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