A Year in Review:
Alchemy Pay’s Incredible Journey through 2021
Now that the new year is here, it’s time to look back on an incredible year of growth and development. Not only was 2021 crypto’s breakthrough year but it was also the breakthrough year for Alchemy Pay. Our unique hybrid fiat-crypto payment network has continued to increase crypto acceptance for real-world payments and is now supported in over 70 countries across the globe.
Before we go on, we want to say a massive thank you to everyone in our community, on our network, and in our team who have given us so much support throughout! We really could not have achieved all this without you!
The year started well with Alchemy Pay setting up a $500,000 Payment Ecosystem Incentive Fund to accelerate DeFi and financial infrastructure developments for the overall good of the industry. Headlines were made with our partnership with Instpower to enable crypto payments across a global network of power bank sharing stations. Also in Q1, we got together with DAO Maker for a strategic collaboration to support their multi-investment ecosystem.
As we moved further into the year we were doing deep research and developments to sow the seeds for potential partnerships and network expansion which would reap huge rewards later in the year. Our Alchemy Pay Wallet achieved functionality and the core development team grew in a big way. There were fresh appointments within the team which resulted in John Tan succeeding Molly Zheng as CEO in an amicable change that has led to a fresh injection of enthusiasm and expertise.
The second half of the year really saw the work we had done pay off in a big way! In Q3, our utility token ACH was listed on multiple exchanges including Poloniex, Coinone, Bitrue, and Changelly, as well as added to Crypto.com’s wallet app and ForTube’s lending platform. One of the world’s most secure exchanges, Gemini began supporting ACH for custody. The news was topped with a listing on Coinbase, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. Supporting and having ownership of our crypto-fiat project was now far more accessible than ever!
The progress didn’t stop there though, as Alchemy Pay expanded in many directions. We launched virtual crypto-linked Mastercard and Visa cards. We began the first steps of a partnership with MEXC Global to provide them with our fiat on-ramps in certain regions (something we would become famous for as the year went on). One of the world’s leading wallet services Cobo signed a strategic cooperation with us to integrate fiat-crypto payment and financial services. August saw another headlining partnership, this time with the world’s largest exchange, Binance. We teamed up with them to drive Binance Pay acceptance across our global merchant network including Shopify.
Q4 saw the culmination of so much work! Our payment network celebrated a milestone of 150 largescale global merchant nodes. At that same time in late October, we founded the Blockchain Infrastructure Alliance alongside blockchain industry leaders, Polygon, Algorand, Avalanche, NEO, NEAR, and many more. The alliance will incubate and fund promising new projects and bring together entities from every area of blockchain. This will continue to gain pace and promote the social benefits of decentralized finance and blockchain. The BIA was inaugurated with a dinner at the Waldorf in Shanghai attended by hundreds of industry luminaries. The event also saw Alchemy Pay announcing the signing of six legendary artists to launch limited-edition crypto-linked cards with NFT faces.
In November, after discussions with Chainlink, we started using their price feeds for DeFi lending and borrowing. The collaboration began with Bella Protocol to launch CeFi and DeFi yield products and also with ARPA to develop our secure global loyalty program. Also in November, our new Chief of Staff, Karmen Tang, gave a Keynote Speech at Lisbon’s Web 3.0 Event hosted by CoinTelegraph.
Our work with the BIA progressed as our CEO, John Tan, interviewed the former Chief Economist of the IMF. Simon Johnson is part of BIA’s Decentralized Discourse series which discusses DeFi and blockchain concepts with experts. John Tan also gave the closing speech at the US Trade Mission for Blockchain and Digital Assets hosted by the US Department of Commerce.
Token integrations, as well as integrations of our mainstream-friendly fiat payment channels, were achieved with numerous major blockchain networks including Elrond, NEAR, Tron, NEO, Polygon, IoTeX, and Avalanche.
This year, Avalanche, NEAR, and Polygon have been the fastest growing networks in the industry. Their rise has been phenomenal as blockchain developers have flocked to them. Avalanche is now talked about with the possibility of surpassing even Ethereum for development while Polygon’s protocol already hosts over 4000 Dapps as it solves Ethereum’s scaling issues. Our fiat payment rails now enable these networks, and others, to directly on-board users into their crypto ecosystems via fiat payment standards like Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal. This is a huge step forward in the goal of global adoption and a revelation for any blockchain Dapp developer.
With all this expansion it was no wonder our payment network received glowing reviews in TokenInsight’s 2021 Digital Assets Payment Industry Research Report.
As you can see, 2021 just kept ramping up as it went on. By the time Q4 came around, all the work we had been doing behind the scenes came to fruition. So 2022 has a lot to live up for sure, but it certainly has started incredibly well: ACH has received a Binance listing; collaborations with MEXC Global partnership that leverages our services in Japan, Korea, and Indonesia; ALGO token and fiat payment channel integration with Algorand; collaboration with MakerDAO and support for their DAI stablecoin on our payment network. And that was just the first two weeks!
Once again, thank you so much for your support and stay on board for a wonderful 2022!
