The Goals of Alchemy

The Goal of Alchemy is to design the payment protocol through community consensus, to build a decentralized, trust powered infrastructure, to expedite the penetration of cryptocurrency into our daily life; and most importantly to return the rights of payment to the merchants, the customer and the market.

1. Decentralization

Alchemy achieves the decentralization of payment networks by integrating with decentralizing cryptocurrency wallets, deploying decentralized technical structures, along with relevant operation and governance mechanisms.

With the frictions and pains working with traditional centralized payment networks such as Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay and other switching network, Alchemy payment network adheres to the concept of “decentralization” from payment currency, technical architecture, operation system and governance mechanism for our visions and goals.

We’ve applied the following technology and measures to achieve decentralization:

• Decentralization of currencies

One of the most fundamental problems of traditional payment networks is that legal FIAT currencies are the exclusive options for transactions. This then helps centralized institutions retain power over the clearing and settlement processes.

As a decentralized open ecosystem, the Alchemy payment network provides access to various assets that can be liquidated, including but not limited to various cryptocurrencies, tokens, credit payments and points of credit service providers, various forms of digital assets, and fiat currencies; ultimately helping to open up options for transactions and not limit them to one single form of currency. We believe users and merchants have the right to choose which currency to use for payment and settlements.

• Decentralization of Technical Infrastructure

The product architecture of Alchemy is composed of five layers: the access layer, the solution layer, the product layer, core layer, and the blockchain network layer. Each of them acts in accordance with the innate principles of decentralization. Each layer is also defined through an open ACH payment consensus protocol to ensure consistency with decentralized applications.

• Decentralization of Operational Mechanism

Based on a Service Level Agreement, ACHPAY has standardized and categorized the daily tasks with a grading system. For example, merchant onboarding process, reconciliation, and settlement are facilitated through the automated and transparent execution of smart contracts; decentralized dispute settlement, decentralized exchange, and decentralized automated clearing houses are all applied to crowd-source the operational tasks to our ecosystem partners. By ensuring quality and efficiency with these operations, every player can expand fast at a more affordable cost by working together.

2. Large-scale Commercial Application

Alchemy meets the needs of large-scale commercial application by supporting complex account infrastructure, complex PUSHPAY and PULLPAY payment models, complex transaction types and more reasonable business flow for payment services.

Modern businesses have many requirements for electronic payment providers but have to subject to all the friction we discussed earlier. Their collective needs continue to be left unresolved in any way. If these market demands cannot be met, or if the pain points cannot be addressed, then using cryptocurrencies as one of the mainstream form of payment will not be realized.

The core demands to help achieve this ultimate vision of mass adoption are:

• Support for complex account infrastructure

In addition to personal accounts, the commercial business also supports complex account types such as hierarchy accounts, escrow accounts, credit accounts, joint accounts, and high-frequency hotspot accounts. For example, many companies and enterprises have special needs for hierarchy of accounts, “payment-collection parallel” model, and payment consolidation accounts.

• Support for complex payment models

Real payment cases include C2C (Customer-to-Customer), C2B (Customerto-Business) and B2B (Business-to-Business). Different business models have corresponding payment models.

For example:

In respect of merchants, the payment model can be divided into: PUSHPAY model with the payer as the payment initiator and PULLPAY model with the payee as the initiator;

In respect of a security model, the payment model can be divided into escrow transactions and standard transactions;

The payment model can also be divided into single payment and batch payment;

In respect of the type of payment, it can be divided into cryptocurrency payment, credit payment, and bonus point payment;

In respect of the corporate payment case, it can be divided into restricted batch payment (salary payment), capital consolidation, fund appropriation, and supply chain factoring.

• Support for complex transactions

Transaction types in real world business are not confined to a simple model between users and merchants. Complex transaction types are also included such as combination payments, subscription payments, batch collection/payments, restricted payments, secured payments, document splitting, transfers, and corporate payments.

• More reasonable support for payment service flow

Traditional electronic payment is greatly restricted by the various rules, regulations, and interface limitations of centralized payment institutions, which lead to the problems of business flow and capital flow, such as the various problems in cross-border receipts.

Through Alchemy’s payment network construction, the payment process can better meet the needs of business processes and helps with business innovation.

• Smart contracts need to become easier to use and meet the requirements of commercial scalability

Alchemy employs a large number of smart contracts to automate payments. However, the deployment and application of smart contracts must rely entirely on professional engineers. It can also be argued that smart contracts are still toys for “techy”. By providing visual friendly tools to template smart contracts, ACHPAY will allow non-technical users to freely edit, create combination of smart contracts to adapt to their needs. At the same time, DAPP developers can launch various innovative smart contract applications in our smart contract app store for a fee.

3. Security and Trust

Alchemy is building a trust-driven ecosystem through credit scoring architecture to address payment security issues.

Various security issues, including fraud, malicious user attacks, phishing sites, and privacy exploitation, exist in the world of both online and offline payment. Therefore, creating a secure payment environment is the top priority for our solution.

The Alchemy ecosystem is trust-driven. To achieve this vison, we will take the following measures:

• Trust-driven ecosystem; merchant’s credit deposit; security fund; privacy protection; credit scoring; decentralized risk management and anti-fraud

4. Sustainable Evolution

Alchemy is an open ecosystem that allows sustainable evolution.

As a basic network for payment, sustainable evolution of the platform is vital for Alchemy. To achieve this, the key lies in our continuous innovative capability by adhering to rules developed through community consensus.

The common rules of the platform are guaranteed by governance mechanisms and consensus mechanisms. As for innovation, the development of electronic payment systems over the past few decades have fully demonstrated that, as long as the power is granted to the innovators who are closer to the market, endless creativity will come along.

In terms of governance mechanisms, Alchemy adopts a completely open ecosystem, enabling participants to focus on what they are good at. Appropriate incentive mechanisms are applied to achieve maximum profit and to stimulate innovation through the market.

5. Operation with Low Cost and High Efficiency

Alchemy achieves low-costs and high efficiency through the decentralized operational support infrastructure.

Operating a payment network involves a large amount of work. This includes merchant onboarding, merchant integration IT support, customized demand for merchants, dispute resolution, clearing and settlements, customer service, risk management, and anti-fraud. The network cannot reach a scale if we cannot provide high efficiency with lower cost.

Alchemy fully exploits the power of blockchain smart contracts, focuses on smart contracts, promotes the decentralization and intelligent construction of the operating system, and relies on the decentralized operational support system to inspire eco-partners to participate in the Alchemy payment network with economic incentives, thus realizing the goal of lowcost and high efficiency.