AMA With Alchemy Pay CEO John Tan

Welcome everyone. I'm Giovanni. Welcome to another Cointelegraph ama. This episode is sponsored by Alchemy Pay, a hybrid Fiat and crypto payment gateway. And today I have the pleasure to be joined by the CEO of Alchemy Pay, John Tan. How are you doing, John? Hi.

I'm good. Hi Giovanni. Thanks for having me here and hi to everybody. Thanks for taking the time to join us today. I'm really excited to share with you what Alchemy is about and what we have in store for you.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. And I am also so excited to see how many, so many people in the chat. I think that we're going to have a lot of questions today, so get ready. And yeah, for everyone who is watching, I'm encouraging everyone to ask their questions. Anything that, any curiosity, anything interesting that comes to your mind about Alchemy Pay, just write them down in the chat and I'm going to ask John about those questions. So before getting started and getting into the topic, let's tell a little bit about you, John. What is your background? I heard that you are the CEO of Alchemy Pay. Became the CEO of Alchemy Pay not long ago. So maybe you want to share some of your background.

Cool. Thanks Giovanni. So everybody, my name is John. I am the CEO of Alchemy Pay and I've joined Alchemy Pay at the start of 2019 as one of the founding team members when I was convinced that blockchain technology will revolutionize the finance and payments industry. And this was way before Alchemy Pay's products and services were ready for launch. So I came from a background of consulting across technological and finance sector. And not too long ago I was a business development manager for Humboldt startup that pioneered mobile car grooming here in Singapore. I always thought that my client facing roles and startup experiences instilled in me the importance importance of focusing on creating value for end users. This fundamental focus required me to throw myself into various departments in Alchemy from product development to operations to risk management compliance, just to ensure that we deliver a world class product to our end users, which are mostly businesses, developers, enterprises with huge merchant networks such as Shopify. And today I'm very honored to be working with my superb team to lead Alchemy Pay as the CEO in creating real world use cases and driving the adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology across the world.

Awesome. Awesome. So thanks a lot for sharing your background. Now I think that it's time to get into the meat of the project. So Alchemy Pay is a hybrid fiat and crypto payment gateway. So that already sounds quite enticing and interesting, but maybe. Can you share a brief overview of what Alchemy Pay is about?

Sure. So Alchemy Pay was launched in 2018 by a team of payment veterans from global payment leaders such as PayPal, G Money, MasterCard and Alipay. The like minded founders were certain that cryptocurrency would play a huge role in the payment space. But they were also acutely aware that cryptocurrency payments would not be something that would take over mainstream payment methods such as credit cards and E wallets overnight. And this is exactly why Alchemy Pay was established to develop the world's first hybrid crypto and fiat payment gateway. So what this means, it sounds complicated, but what this really means is that merchants will be able to use one single API, one single payment terminal or mobile app to accept both cryptocurrency and fiat payment methods. This is absolutely critical to the adoption of, of cryptocurrency as a form of payment methods. Why, you may ask? Because majority of merchants and businesses are reluctant to take on a new payment system just to accept cryptocurrencies. And this is really a major issue even without crypto in the picture. For instance, the next time when you're at a restaurant, you pick over the counter to see the number of payment devices they have. They will have one for credit card, a couple for mobile wallets, and a few QR codes displayed for E wallet payments. What Alchemy Pay does is we aggregate all these mainstream fiat payment channels and we add on cryptocurrency acceptance so that merchants will be willing to use our payment systems. In this way, we are providing value to merchants while preparing them for the global transitions towards cryptocurrency era.

Awesome. Awesome. And I'm actually quite excited about this project because it has a purpose as a fundamental purpose as the, the its goal. It's to increase mass adoption, not basing itself on rising prices, but on real utility. So maybe, maybe you can check.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So sorry to cut you off. So, but we really, I absolutely agree with what you just said. You know, we are just looking purely at adoption real world use cases. We, you know, I, I constantly are reminding my team you should never look at a token price. We should just focus on real world use cases driving partnerships to conducting integration and you know, token price and you know, investors will come in naturally, organically. We don't, we do not have to go and conduct marketing just Just so to. Just so. Just so that we get more interest from the investors. Right.

And now I would like to get more into details about how this payment system works. So apparently you are providing a very wide range of payment services all included in one single product. So maybe you can explain exactly how it works.

So for our cryptocurrency acceptance, Alchemy pay integrates with a network of crypto exchanges, OTCs such as the likes of Binance, Honda, Hopi, Global, Bitfinex and OTC such as QCP Capital, which is the largest OTC in Southeast Asia and many more. And many of such partners allow us to help merchants convert their inbound cryptocurrencies into fiat currencies in real time to mitigate any volatility risk and pay merchants in local currency that they prefer. Additionally, we are constantly working scaling solutions onto our platforms to create a seamless transaction experience for both parties in a payment transaction. This includes second layer solutions such as Lightning Network and other creative solutions such as using multi signature wallets, leveraging blockchain analytics to study transaction inputs to be able to approve zero block confirmation transactions effectively. When we are compared to other the current mainstream global payment methods such as credit card that typically charges they typically charge between 2.5% to 3.5% plus a fixed fee per transaction and they only pay out to merchants in a week or two which can cause cash flow issues. Our payment solution on cryptocurrency acceptance takes away all of this unnecessary middleman out of the equation. Our merchants can expect to save 60 to 70% in fees and receive their money as early as the next day. Of course this is just on the cryptocurrency acceptance for the fiat payment acceptance be As I mentioned earlier, our founders, they have networks in the payment space for decades and they are able to connect alchemy pay to the fiat payment channels. We are able to integrate them by putting them all into one single solution for the merchants.

Yeah, I think that's very exciting because as you mentioned, including all these options into one single product may sound very attractive for a lot of users. I'm seeing a lot of comments in the chat and I think that a lot of those comments are focused on the token that is powering your project. Alchemy pay is powered by specific token called the ach which if I'm not mistaken launched not long ago on Coinbase. Right, okay, so now I understand the reason for so much excitement. A lot of people here are asking when will be the binance listing when it will be listed on Binance.

Well, that's a question that I obviously cannot answer. So when we listed on Coinbase, it came as a surprise to us as well. So a lot of these exchanges, this top exchanges, to keep their due diligence process highly confidential, alchemy pay. What we would do is we would work together with their research team and due diligence team to provide all the information that they require to take to decide whether alchemy pay is suitable for listing. But we are not able to share information like this. And in fact if you were to share information like this, we could end up not being able to list on the exchange. Right. So I think we should stay away from crashing like this. If we would like Alchemy to be listed on top exchanges like Binance, it makes sense.

I think that a lot of people here are just so excited that they cannot just wait for that moment when it will be listed on Binance. That's why they are asking even though of of course we cannot disclose any information. So I'm curious to know a little bit more if you allow me to ask about this token ach. So if you can maybe share more information about the functionality of this token. Because as you mentioned, it's not about the price, but it's about the utility. Right. So I guess that you have some information to share about this token.

Sure. The two main features of alchemy tokens would be, number one would be gaining access to our services. Meaning that if we were to provide this service to merchants or we provide to a payments company to integrate with us, they would have to pledge a certain amount of ach. And this amount of ACH is dependent on the amount of transactions that they expect and the industry that they are in. The reason why they have to pledge this is because the payment industry is one that is highly regulated. And if you were to provide a cryptocurrency acceptance to a company, for instance, they inform us that they are doing the onboarding process. They inform us that they are going to be using this payment channel for apparel, selling clothing or electronics, but end up they are using this for online gambling which could be illegal in the country that they are operating. So we would expect them to pledge this amount of ACH to prevent any following behaviors to mitigate such behaviors. And if they were to fought the rules that they we have set for them, then we would be this, this, this pledge amount of ACH will be confiscated and we will terminate working relationship with them. So that is the first thing. Another thing would be the incentive mechanism, meaning that a big over 51% of our of our ACH total supply of ACH is allocated for the incentive mechanism. Our goal is to drive the adoption of cryptocurrencies. As I mentioned earlier and at this early stage we need to incentivize users, we need to incentivize payment companies and merchants to start using our payment system. So while they have to pledge a certain amount of ach, they are able to earn use. Let's say if they would contribute 30% of the total transaction on our network, then they are able to get 30% of the rewards that we have as incentives. We also have other incentives where early payment companies, let's say a payment company joins our network early, earlier, they are able to get a certain percentage of the get a certain percentage of the allocation for such incentives as well. So if you look at it as a whole, it's really to to gain access to our services and as well as incentivize usage of our payment system and driving transactions on our network. Of course there are other use cases such as voting, decentralized governance, but I will not go into the details of that since the main focus should be on incentives as well as getting access to our services.

All right. And I see here in the comments a lot of questions regarding the supply. So a lot of people are asking why are you increasing the supplies of ACH token? Is there any reasons for that?

The current total supply is at 10 billion and it has always been the max supply and the total supply is fixed at 10 billion. We are releasing tokens as I mentioned earlier, the incentives are released by smart contract on the monthly basis and that has been the case since day one. So on the monthly basis we will be releasing tokens for the team in order for us to continue running operations. But more importantly, as I mentioned earlier, 51% of the token are going to be released on a monthly basis over the next five, five years for the to incentivize the transactions on our network. Cool.

Okay, now I would like to switch back to the previous topic when we were discussing the overall competitive advantage of alchemy pay. Maybe you're able to tell us who do you see as your main competitors on the market right now and what competitive advantage ultimate pay can offer? Just maybe you mentioned a few of them earlier, but let's focus now on that topic. So potential competitors and competitive advantages.

Okay, perhaps I can share an example later on, but I would like to start off with one of the largest advantage of alchemy pay is our hybrid crypto and Fiat model, which I explained earlier. We are able to develop this because our founders deep experience and strong network in the payment industry. So regulations and bearish entries put up by major payment companies can often slow down and cripple newer companies trying to offer fiat payment channels. And we are able to do so simply because our founders have the network and the connection between the fiat payment industry to, to enable us to integrate such fiat payment channels. And what also stands out about Alchemy is our top down strategy where we only work with industry leaders that can help drive adoption at scale. For instance, we most recently partnered with Binance Pay to become their exclusive partners to provide Binance pay to all Shopify merchants across the world. What this really means is that in just one single partnership we one single integration, we are now connecting over 60 million of Binance users to millions of Shopify merchants for instant transactions with no gas fees for over 40 cryptocurrencies. This was only made possible and came on the back of our partnership with Binance last year where we integrated BUSD and BNB onto our payment system. And we have continuously proved to be a top partner of choice for Binance. So you know, so Alchemy really has the experience and we are able to, we are proving to top partners that have the merchant networks. And this means that a single integration will bring us thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of merchants. And I would really like to take a step back at this point in time to implore our viewers and crypto investors to think about the point and value of comparing and debating between which crypto project is better or which and eventually pitting projects against each other. The crypto industry is very young and we need to work together to get the rest of the world on board. I see fellow payment projects such as Flexa Network as my peers. We may have very different strategies, but we have the same goal and objective which is to drive the adoption of crypto payments. And if my peers are doing something better, we will simply learn and adopt that into our strategy. There are hundreds of millions of merchants out there. There's enough of them to go around. But the real question is, are there enough of us payment projects to get these merchants onboarded? So to end off this question, I wouldn't want to be placed in a position to put down any of my competitors. But to say that a lot of our competitors, such as Flexer Network, they are doing a good job and if there's something that they are doing better, we will learn. But I believe strongly in Alchemy's strategy, which is know one single integration with a top partner to bring us millions of merchants. We don't, we believe that having to integrate with multiple parties from the wallet side to the merchant side, and that could take way too long. What we really need right now is adoption, more merchants getting used to accepting cryptocurrencies and that is exactly what we are, we are achieving here.

Yeah, actually that's very interesting because what made me think about is the situation in El Salvador where now the government of El Salvador decided to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender. And it's still unclear whether it's going to make it successful experiment. So it's still unclear whether people in El Salvador will start adopting Bitcoin and using it as a regular mean of payment. And I am curious to see what kind of technological solution are they going to implement in order to make people's life easier and enable those payments with bitcoin. So people there will be. Sorry, you were saying something? I think you froze. John.

Sorry, Giovanni, I think I lost you there.

Hello, can you hear me?

So I'm not sure whether it's my connection. Yeah, I can hear you now. I lost you there. You mentioned El Salvador.

Yeah, I was just wondering whether your product, you think that your product could be useful for being implemented in a situation like the one in El Salvador.

Okay, that's a very good question actually. So in fact we have been in talks with one of the top know, I cannot really go into the details just because this concerts govern and it can be highly sensitive. But we have been talks with someone from their team that is driving this project. And truthfully we have informed them that it doesn't matter if you know whether they're going to be using alchemy solution. But you know, we are happy to share with them what we have learned in the past couple of years to help them in their journey to the adoption of cryptocurrencies. So you know, even talking about remittance and payments, that's something that we are very familiar with. And so we are guiding them along that. But of course we have also shared with them a case study, a proposition where they can be, they can use our solution. But the truth is that El Salvador government has been working with several parties ready and you know, bringing alchemy in at this point in time could disrupt their plans. So basically what we have shared with them is that merchants, there are many different kind of merchants in El Salvador. Some of them are large enterprises that have different, for instance, various stores under them or various brands under them and they need a payment system that is able to provide them with a backend portal to manage these transactions. So Alchemy pay, we are very familiar with serving large merchants. We have a backend portal to support a single store. We have a backend portal to support the entire enterprise or a conglomerate for instance, so that they can manage their transactions. Imagine one single finance manager is able to use our banking portal to track down all the transactions that takes place using our payment system and is able to track all the settlement easily. So that is something that we are looking at and are discussing with El Salvador. But as mentioned, we are more than happy to be just an advisor to to the El Salvador team to make sure that they can achieve the the to drive blockchain adoption.

Yeah, that's awesome to hear that you are involved in all this situation in El Salvador because I think that's a very important testing ground for crypto adoption. So if they succeed in making it real, then maybe other places in the world will follow that example and there will be more and more requests for solutions like yours, possibly. So I wanted to ask you another question from the audience because people are quite interested in a pay card. So they are asking about whether there will be an Alchemy pay card, I guess, with which you can pay with the token that you released.

So we already have the technical capability to launch such a product. We have already done beta testing and all of this runs very well. But the question is, is it something that Alchemy want to focus on? Meaning that do we want to release our own cut for consumers to use? That might not be the strategic direction that we want to focus on because most of the solutions that Alchemy are developing are targeted at merchants, businesses and payment projects. The reason why that is so is we are targeting our top, top down model, meaning that we work with large enterprises, they have a network of users or they have a network of merchants or businesses. We want to target these people because we believe that that's the fastest way to drive adoption. So the crypto link cuts business that we have provided came on the back of business queries on other companies looking to issue their own crypto link cuts. So we have now prepared this, developed this solution and tested it and it has proven to work absolutely perfect. And for the next step, what we may be doing is to launch this as a white label service to other projects so that they can issue their own crypto link cards, or we can even provide this service to financial institutions who are interested in providing their clients with crypto link cards. So it is likely that we will be focusing our attention on providing this as a white label service to businesses.

Okay, that's interesting. So instead of having your own branded car, you provide the technology that allows other company to release their own card.

Hi, Giovanni.

Hey, John. Was I cut again? Can you hear me? Is it okay? Can you hear me?

That's correct. Okay, that is correct. So we have to focus on to be white label service for the crypto link cards.

Awesome. Okay, now I would like to continue with a question regarding the times we live in right now. So the COVID 19 pandemic accelerated the transition towards a cashless society. So what impact did the pandemic have on alchemy Pace development?

Sorry, Giovanni, I think I'm losing you again.

Right, let me get back to this question. So can you hear me now? It seems the connection is not perfect. So John, can you hear me now?

Hey, Giovanni. Oh yeah, I think I'm losing you again.

Yeah, I can see. I can hear you. But it seems that we have some connectivity issues. Hey John, can you hear me? It's weird. John.

Hi, Giovanni.

Hey, Giovanni. Hey John, can you hear me?

Hello. Sorry, my connection is. It's a little bit spotty here and I'm in a hotel right now and I think the connection is a bit spotty.

Right, but can you hear me now? Can you. John?

Hi, Joni. Can you hear me?

Yes, I can. What about you? Can you hear me?

I can hear you now. I'm so sorry about that. I think my connection is a little bit spotty here right now.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's. The problem is.

I think it's final. I think it sounds like it's final. I believe earlier you mentioned about. Was it a question on. On. Could you. Could you repeat the last question? I didn't really hear the full question.

Yep. So I want to ask you about the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on the development of your project. So we saw that the pandemic has accelerated the transition towards a cashless society. So payment. Digital payment services are becoming more and more popular and I guess that that also had an impact on the. The development of your company. Can't hear me, John?

Hi, Giovanni, can you hear me now?

Yes, I can always hear you.

Sorry to the viewers. I. My connection is really having some issue. Allow me to. To reconnect really quickly. Hopefully that will solve the issue.

Yeah, let's see if we can fix this.

Hi, Giovanni.

Okay, we are back. I can. I can. We are Back here. John, can you hear me?

So sorry about that. Yeah, I can hear loud and clear now.

Awesome. Okay, so did you get my question or.

Yeah, I did. I got your question. So I believe you mentioned how the COVID pandemic has affected the global. The affected us globally and you know, accelerated. Accelerated the transition towards a cashless society. And you know, what are the impacts on Alchemy Pay and how on our development direction. So when Alchemy Pay first launched in 2019, I was constantly onboarding merchants where we taught crypto holders will spend their money at, you know, this includes skybusiness clubs, high end restaurants and retail stores. In less than a year, I had onboarded over 3,500 merchants across Singapore and Hong Kong. And I'll be frank, that Covid hit us pretty bad because many of our merchants target audiences were tourists. So naturally, when the waters were shut, our transaction volume plummeted. However, there are opportunities in every crisis and when one door shuts, another opens. So we began to pivot our efforts towards online transactions just as e commerce began to take off faster than it really was. For example, we initially were only working with Shopify in a few regions, but today we are serving them globally. And at this moment we are constantly speaking to traditional payment companies on how we can work together to provide them with crypto acceptance services into their service offering. One integration with them can easily add thousands, if not millions of merchants onto our network. Of course, Regulatory landscape around the world. With that said, we expect our growth and adoption of our solutions to scale up rapidly in the near future.

Okay, actually now I would like to switch gears and start talking a little bit about how developers are incentivized to work on your platform. So we have been talking a lot about merchants. Now let's talk about how you plan to incentivize developers to come on your platform and build and build there. John, I think, I think I lost you again. Let's see if we can fix this. Oh, maybe.

Hi, sorry, I'm back. I'm back again. I heard your question. So you were talking about how we plan to incentivize developers to build on our platform, right?

Yes. Sorry, sorry. Before you start, if you have troubles with connection, maybe you can try to switch off your camera. The next time you have troubles with connection, you can switch off your camera and we can improve the conversation like that so that it won't be as.

Heavy will do so most of our development are done in house due to the sensitivities and compliance requirements with the regulators. However, Alchemy Pay acts as an enabler for developers. Many of our clients are actually developers that create software, games, mobile applications that need to receive payments from the end clients. Alchemy Pay powers them with the capability to target customers from all over the world with our hybrid crypto and Fiat Gateway. But with that said, most of our development are done in house and it's mostly due to the sensitivities and compliance requirements data privacy with the regulators.

Thanks. So now I would like to continue a little bit of picking up some questions from the audience. Let's see if there is any interesting question. Yeah, actually people were asking about partnerships. If you could focus a little bit on that. So any upcoming partnerships or something that, something that is going on on that side, would you able to share?

Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that you know, a lot of the partnerships that we are targeting we are not looking for just the small medium sized business, we are really looking for the top businesses. And this would be, you know, our strategy in terms of popular uprising, the use of digital currencies. Right. So when Covid hit us last year, Alchemy based management team were thinking hard about how we can continue to drive adoption. And it was then we realized why crypto adoption has been slow for so many years. If you think about it, only a small percentage of the world is involved in crypto and understands blockchain. We need to make it easy for the rest of the world to get on board the RSS crypto ship. So I recall reading an article about investors who are crypto curious. About 80, 90% of these potential investors gave up five minutes into checking our crypto exchanges, which are the mainstream way to buy into cryptocurrencies just because it's so complicated. But they are very telling signs that the rest of the world wants to get on board. I'll share perhaps two examples with you. So the first example would be Square Cash App. Square Cash App is charging. They're making it really easy for their users to buy Bitcoin despite charging a huge amount of fees compared to crypto exchanges. But users are willing to do to pay for these fees because it's really easy to use. They can buy bitcoin in under 30 seconds. And another thing to look at is let's say you have USD today and you want to gain some interest. If you put it into savings account you're getting so less than 0.5%. If you put it into fixed deposit you're getting perhaps 3%. But if you convert that USD into USDT, you can get excess of 10% in yield. But why are not more people in the fiat world joining converting their USD into USDT to gain this yield simply because they don't know how to do so? There's a huge opportunity in this sense where we can connect the fiat rule as well as the crypto economy together to drive more adoption and drive more people from the fiat role into the crypto economy. So with the technical infrastructure that we have built, the regulatory experience that we have garnered, and our existing fiat payment channels, we are building solutions to help provide simple and seamless way for new investors to buy into crypto assets directly with their local fiat currencies in less than 30 seconds. In addition, we are also helping them gain access to highly lucrative use in the defi space without having to deal with any of such complexities. And the reason why I'm sharing this with you when talking about partnership is we already have secured partnerships. You know, in all of the business that we launch, we always tap onto partnerships to help us really roll out and scale quickly. So I can't really share these partners at this point in time, but I can tell you that we have two major partnerships that we have secured thus far. And stay tuned. We will be announcing these partnerships in the near future. But these are really massive partnerships that will take us be able to drive these solutions that we have developed across an entire region.

Yeah. And we're going to follow closely the development of your project in the following months. For everyone who is curious to check this project, just go to the website. But for now I would like to follow up with a question regarding the popularization of digital currencies. So basically Alchemy Pay is aiming at increasing the popularization of digital currencies. And it's clear that in order to do so there needs to be some sort of connection between the crypto world and the traditional financial world so that crypto gets adopted and gets into the mainstream. I was wondering the top. You mentioned stablecoins, you mentioned usdt. So stablecoins are used as a kind of bridge between fiat and crypto. Right? So I was wondering, how is your product, how is your product directed in the sense towards stablecoins? So what is your view of stablecoins and what kind of role do they play in your product? Is your product like a competitor of stablecoins or you are potentially embracing this technology?

We are definitely embracing the stable stablecoin. We are able to conduct a lot of the businesses that we are doing because there's high liquidity for stablecoin and this works for us in both the payments business as well as the crypto investment businesses that I mentioned to you earlier. So on the payment side, the stablecoins are really important to us because we need to sell any inbound cryptocurrencies into USDT or other stable currencies to remove the volatility risk. And at the same time, we would be using this stablecoin going to OTCs to convert them into fiat currencies. So the stablecoin practically provides us with a conduit to remove the risk and convert into fiat currencies, which is absolutely necessary for the payments business. On the other hand, for the investment business, we will be getting fiat currency from our users. They could be paying through credit cards, they could be doing through bank transfers, but at the end of the day, if we were to want to help them gain access to DEFI services, what we need to do is convert that into stablecoins first. So stablecoins really acts as a conduit for the fiat world and the crypto world. And in order to drive the adoption of cryptocurrencies, there needs to be a lot of liquidity for USDT to and other stable coins into the fiat currencies. And that is the trend that we are seeing right now. The amount of liquidity is picking up and we are leveraging that trend to drive the adoption and use cases.

That's interesting. So I'm glad to hear that your project is also embracing stablecoin technology, as this is one of the most, in my opinion, interesting technologies in the crypto world. So it's good that you are also taking advantage of that. So we have some other questions from the audience here. Maybe you can give us some thoughts about security and stability. So what can bring about security and stability to the ACH investors?

Sorry, could you repeat that question again?

So what news you can give us about security and stability regarding the ACH investors? So I guess the question is how can investors in your token be provided with the security and stability? I guess in terms of price movements of the token.

I think I would first like to touch on the point where alchemy pay. We hardly ever conduct any trading. We do have engaged a market maker just because the price differences between different exchanges such as Huobi and Coinbase is too big and we simply engage a market maker to ensure that they provide liquidity so that traders are able to trade at a fair price and we do not make any money out of it. So we do not control the price at all. This is, this is for. For sure. But what I can give you in terms of a peace of mind is that we have secured really massive partnerships and it is at this point in time, it is just not the right time to announce. We are as, as I mentioned, I. I think you know my team has announced on Twitter earlier, just a couple of days ago that a lot of our businesses, it takes time to conduct integration. It takes time for us to get necessary licenses. And whenever Alchemy makes an announcement, it is something massive. The next announcement regarding a partnership is going to be something really massive. Stay tuned to it. I can't really share it right now just because we have signed an NDA with the partner, but it is, it is our largest partnership by far, so far.

Cool. Yeah. And I just noticed we were just saying that the price of your token skyrocketed a few weeks ago. So I think that there is a lot of attention on the price. I saw a lot of questions regarding the price of the token in the chat. Some people were asking what is your price target for the end of the year. I guess you are not too eager to give your price predictions for that token, right?

The truth is I can't even give a prediction just because I don't even know where is it going. I mentioned to the viewers earlier and you earlier that I have constantly been reminding my team not to focus on the price. We will focus on the actual adoption. We will create the use cases and that's the reason why we are able to secure partnerships like Binance, Pay, Shopify and there are going to be more partnerships. And when I talk about these partnerships, I'm talking about conglomerates. These are conglomerates that own shopping malls, they own properties like hotels and other conglomerate owns banks and real estates. So these are the partners that we are working with. And when these partnerships are announced, you, you know, investors would understand what we are working towards. And you know, we are some, we are a project for long term investors. We are not here for speculation because honestly if you ask me, I do not care about a short term price movement as well. We really are just focused on driving adoption and use cases. And I believe that that's what investors should be doing as well if they, if they were to want to have a sound long term investment plan.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that the price should be a reflection of the actual utility that you are providing to the crypto space. So guys, if you are curious to know more about the partnerships that Alchemy Pay is building up, just go to the website AlchemyTech IO and you can find a lot more information over there. So now I would like to focus on the milestones. So when we have an AMA with a project it's always a little bit unclear what are the milestones that have already been achieved and those that still have to be achieved. So maybe you want to guide us through your milestones that you hope to achieve in the following months and the status of your project currently so that people understand what is the timeline more or less.

Sure, I can share you the next couple of months milestones because our integration plans and our operational plans have been lined up way beyond 2021. So presently in the next few months we are integrating with Binance Pay. So Binance pays as a, as a centralized service. We are integrating with them before we can then integrate with Shopify. So in the next two months, two, three months, that is definitely one of our top priority. It's a very major project with us and we believe that, you know, with Binance, 60 plus million users and Shopify, over 1 million merchants, that will bring a lot of transactions on our network. So that is one of our key priority. And I mentioned to you earlier that you know, adoption is on top of our mind. It's our mission is to bridge the crypto and fiat economies. So the strategic shift towards focusing on making crypto investment really easy as well as granting easy access, seamless and easy direct fiat access into defi products is something that we are looking at and it's something that we have really put together infrastructure and are going to be developing the solutions. So these solutions, it's not that we are developing solutions without a partner, we have already identified a partner. We are applying for licenses and about to get the licenses and we will be launching this solution. So right now it's just on us to develop this solution, to test it out to make sure that it works well. And we will be launching into a market where there's already demand for it. So that is for one region and we have another partner. So this same model where targeting on crypto investment as well as Defi services is something that would be what we will be rolling out in the next one year. I'm pretty confident it's something that we will be focused on the next one year and there's a lot of inquiries coming in on how we can provide this to other businesses as well. But as I mentioned, we only focus on the, the really large businesses. We're talking about multi billion companies that we are going to be working with when it comes to adoption and Scalability, it doesn't make sense for us to integrate and spend too much resources on smaller size SME businesses.

Sounds exciting. So I think that now I would like to know something about the regulatory aspect of all this because you as a business have quite ambitious aims. So you aim to revolutionize how basically the payment system works. So I guess that regulatory aspects are also important. And lately we have been seeing regulatory action going on in the United States. Some people are a bit worried that there could be tough regulation in crypto businesses. So I saw a question before. They were asking whether you have plans to expand your operations in the US and if you are facing any obstacles in doing so.

Okay. Our home ground is Asia, right. Because we have the network, we know how to apply for the licenses. We have been operating this year for a while now. And the next region that we are moving is into really fast with the partner would be the Middle east region. And we already identified partners in the European region. However, for the US Market, it's a, it's a very, it's a, it's a market that we need to enter very carefully just because of the regulatory, how, how strict the, the governance, the, the regulators are there as well as how they are constantly evolving. So we do need to identify a partner, we do need to identify a partner that we can trust to launch our services into the US So the, the stance that Alchemy, Alchemy adopts is to not rush into things. You know, we are serving merchants. Payments is a fundamental element of the business. We are not, we shouldn't be rushing into business telling them over promising our merchants and ending up having to withdraw and leaving them stranded. So whenever we move into a regional market, we have to identify a very strong partner with strong regulatory experiences as well as network before we move in the market. So moving into us, we could potentially be doing so by true. Our partnership with Shopify by targeting US Merchants for start.

All right, so quite cautious approach, which is of course, I guess the best one, especially when it comes to a tough regulatory environment like the one in the US So I think that we could move on and wrap things up soon. John, maybe you have some final remarks that you would like to make. So something that, that our audience should know about Alchemy Pay that we haven't mentioned or something that you would like to underscore.

I would really say that Alchemy Pay is more than just a payments company. We are leveraging our hybrid crypto and fiat payment gateway to find ways to drive adoption and the seamless way to invest into cryptocurrencies as well as access to defi yield solutions and products. It's just one of the service offerings that we can explore. There are many other ways that we are currently working on, but due to NDAs with our partners we are not able to review that just yet. But stay tuned to our Twitter as well as our telegram page to be finding out, you know, what are we working on on a regular basis.

Yeah, just stay tuned. And I'm pretty excited to see how this project is going to develop because it's about one of the main problems of the industry, which is actually real adoption and real use cases. So no speculation, no focus on price rising, but real use cases. So it's about money, so it's about how to exchange these things. Crypto and fiat together in one same product. So if you are curious to know more, just also check the website alchemytech IO and you can find more information about the project. So I would like to thank our audience which today was amazing. We had a lot of people asking a lot of questions. I think that's a good start. Definitely it means that the project has already a lot of followers. So thank you everyone for watching and thank you John for joining Wozho today.

Thank you everybody, thanks for your time. Just to end this off again, we are a long term project. Whatever you have seen so far is simply a mere glimpse into what we have in store for you. The potential of alchemy is much bigger than what you are seeing right now.

Cool. Okay. So thank you for everyone for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel. I'm Giovanni, your host. See you next time.

All right, thanks.