The overall crypto industry is valued at a massive $1.7 trillion; however, this impressive market cap still pales in comparison to the much larger size of the traditional fiat economy. The two economic ecosystems have traditionally been fairly siloed from each other, with many crypto projects actively avoiding the fiat system and many other projects simply being incompatible with the centralized nature of fiat. One project that’s aiming to bridge the gap between the two worlds and combine the two massive markets is Alchemy Pay, a hybrid cryptocurrency payment platform that allows users and merchants to engage in both fiat and crypto payments. Alchemy Pay hopes to make it easier for individuals to purchase goods and services with crypto through seamless conversion of crypto into cash.
What is Alchemy Pay?
Alchemy Pay is a payment system that allows customers to use both crypto and fiat to complete transactions and purchases. Alchemy Pay provides its very own Point of Service Terminal and Payment Infrastructure for merchants and vendors, thus allowing them to set up their entire payment systems around Alchemy Pay. Once set up, merchants can easily accept both crypto and fiat for whatever service or product they offer – from online e-commerce to brick and mortar grocery stores.
Alchemy Pay is an all-in-one payment system. Not only does Alchemy Pay accept both fiat and crypto, but the infrastructure is also set up to support a variety of business structures from Customer to Business, Business to Business, Customer to Customer, and Enterprise Level transactions. Beyond business types, Alchemy Pay also provides businesses with the flexibility to operate globally, as Alchemy pay currently operates in over 60 countries and provides over 200 payment channels for fiat and crypto acceptance. Alchemy Pay is currently partnered with payment channels such as Mastercard, Visa, Alipay, WeChat Pay, and Shopify.
How Does Alchemy Pay Work?
ACH Token
The ACH token is Alchemy Pay’s native token. The ACH token plays several important roles within the Alchemy Pay ecosystem. The most important function of ACH is pledging. Any ecosystem partner – such as crypto-exchanges, e-Commerce platforms, payment companies, and financial institutions – who want to access Alchemy Pay’s services, must buy and pledge ACH in proportion to their network size and projected transaction volume. The pledged ACH can be returned upon cancellation of the partner’s usage of Alchemy Pay or it can be forfeited in case of unfair fraudulent behavior. This pledging system provides the ACH token tangible value while also serving as an incentive for fair and honest behavior. Another major purpose of the ACH is DAO Governance. Each ACH token entitles the owner the right to vote on key business decisions and protocol changes. This provides users who heavily utilize Alchemy Pay further incentive to buy and hold ACH.
Conversion
The key to Alchemy Pay’s product is the instant conversion between crypto and fiat. Utilizing its unique payment gateway system, Alchemy Pay is able to offer fast conversions with low fees. The average transaction fee on Alchemy Pay is 70% lower than traditional credit cards, and the average transaction settlement period is only one or two days. To access real-time price data to ensure all conversions are accurate and reliable, Alchemy Pay uses Chainlink’s Price Feed Oracle which provides accurate live price information.
Chainlink Integration with Alchemy Pay (Source: Alchemy Pay Medium)
Large Commercial Application
Another key aspect of Alchemy Pay is its ability to be utilized by large scale global commercial enterprises and not just smaller retail stores. What this specifically means is that Alchemy Pay’s technology and payment system can support the complex account infrastructure of commercial applications, such as hierarchy accounts, payment collection, parallel accounts, payment consolidation accounts, escrow accounts, and more.
Furthermore, Alchemy Pay can support complex transactions such as combination payments, subscription payments, split payments, and more. Lastly, Alchemy Pay can transcend borders and allow enterprises to use Alchemy Pay across a variety of regions – instead of having to find a new payment system for each region they operate in. All of these offerings will be incredibly beneficial in helping Alchemy Pay incentives other large-scale corporations to partner with them. Previously, corporations have often been unable to adopt crypto payment gateways, as many of the other crypto gateways do not meet the complex needs and financial systems of such large multinational corporations.
Who Is Behind Alchemy Pay?
Alchemy Pay’s Founder and Chairman, Shawn Shi, is a seasoned Entrepreneur who previously served as the vice president of technology at the Chinese insurance company ZhongAn. Alchemy Pay is currently led by the CEO John Tan, a growth guru with eight years of experience in business development at various payment service providers and PR agencies. John Tan has experience working for a multitude of Fortune 500 companies including Honeywell, RSA, DBS Bank, and more. The last member of Alchemy Pay’s leadership team is Molly Zhang, the Senior Advisor. Molly Zhang has over 20 years of experience in the payment industry including serving as the Senior Consultant at Paypal China, SVP of HSBC China, Chief Representative of MasterCard China, and more. Overall, the Alchemy Pay leadership team brings a wealth of experience working in the traditional payment service industry.
In terms of funding and partnerships, the precise quantity of Alchemy Pay’s funding is not publicly available; however, their website lists an array of impressive strategic and corporate partners including Shopify, Polygon, Arcadier, Tron, Chainlink, DAO Maker, QFPAY, and more.
Alchemy Pay Partners (Source: Market Realist)
ACH Price History & Price Prediction
ACH debuted in 2020 at a price of $0.02. Throughout the next year, ACH traded downwards with its price dropping to $0.0016 by July of 2021. However, ACH’s fortunes quickly changed in August of 2021, when its price rocketed more than 4,000% to its ATH of $0.1975.
This meteoric rise was primarily driven by Alchemy Pay’s news about its industry partnerships to drive crypto adoption. Since the rise to its ATH, however, ACH has traded on a steep downward trajectory in tandem with the overall trend in the crypto market, and is currently trading at $0.02354, an 88% reduction from its August ATH.
ACH All Time Price Performance (Source: CoinMarketCap)
What Is The Future of Alchemy Pay?
The future success of Alchemy Pay will largely depend on two major factors: competition and partnerships.
Competition
The crypto payment gateway industry is quite popular and consists of many competitors hoping to achieve similar objectives to Alchemy Pay. Some of Alchemy Pay’s most prominent competitors are Ripple (XRP), Stellar (XLM) and CRO. This high level of competition is undoubtedly a negative factor that will impact Alchemy Pay’s ability to succeed in the long run. If Alchemy Pay is to succeed in the long term, they must find unique ways to differentiate themselves from the rest of the industry.
Partnerships
Another crucial factor that will influence Alchemy Pay’s success is its partnerships. It does not matter how strong Alchemy Pay’s back-end technology is, if Alchemy Pay does not have vendors that users can transact with or crypto wallets that users can pay with, then Alchemy Pay’s product will not provide users any value.
That being said, since its inception, Alchemy Pay has successfully amassed a strong array of partners including Shopify and many others. 2022 has also been a strong year partnership wise, with Alchemy Pay launching new partnerships with Algorand (ALGO), Paytend, MAP, GrePay, and NIUM. Alchemy pay has done well in the partnerships department so far; however, it still has a lot of room for growth. If Alchemy Pay is to have continued success, they must continue growing their partnerships, especially with large-scale mainstream vendors. As increasing the vendors and companies that accept Alchemy Pay, will be a crucial step in helping Alchemy Pay grow and generate more users.
How to Buy ACH on Phemex?
Phemex offers both spot and contract trading for investors to choose from. However, for beginning crypto buyers, spot trading is recommended. To buy ACH on Phemex, follow the instructions below.
- The first step to buying cryptocurrency on Phemex is to go to the Phemex homepage, register for an account, and select Markets.
- On the Markets tab enter ACH into the search bar on the top right, immediately after, the ACH/USDT trading pair will appear below – select Trade to move on to the next step.
- You will then be redirected to the Phemex trading platform for the ACH/USDT To do a simple spot trade we recommend doing a market order where you can buy ACH at the market price. To do so, select Market, enter the amount of USDT you want to buy of ACH, and click Buy ACH.
Conclusion
Alchemy Pay is a payment service provider that aims to bridge the gap between fiat and crypto. Alchemy Pay allows merchants to accept payments in both fiat and crypto and offers fast and cheap conversion of crypto. Alchemy Pay provides a variety of features and products that makes Alchemy Pay a flexible system that enterprises of any size can use. Alchemy pay is currently trading much lower than its all-time-high; however, its strong partnerships should provide ACH with a strong backbone to see further growth in the future.