{"id":11649,"date":"2021-08-23T00:32:23","date_gmt":"2021-08-22T21:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esatoshi.club\/?p=11649"},"modified":"2021-08-23T00:32:25","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T21:32:25","slug":"alchemy-pay-x-satoshi-club-ama-recap-from-20th-of-august","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/satoshi-club.esipick.com\/index.php\/2021\/08\/23\/alchemy-pay-x-satoshi-club-ama-recap-from-20th-of-august\/","title":{"rendered":"Alchemy Pay x Satoshi Club AMA Recap from 20th of August"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Welcome to another episode of our AMA\nseries. Today we are glad to tell you about the AMA session with our friends\nfrom Alchemy Pay<\/a>, the pioneer of\nthe world\u2019s first hybrid crypto and fiat payment solution. The AMA took place on August 20 and our guests\nwas John Tan, CEO of the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The total reward pool was 500$ and was\ndivided into three parts. In this AMA Recap we will try to summarize some of\nthe most interesting points for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY\nQUESTIONS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mary | Satoshi Club: <\/strong>Hello\nSatoshi Club! We are happy to announce our AMA session with Alchemy Pay!\nWelcome to Satoshi Club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>hello\n@madamlobster thanks for having me. happy to be here to share with everyone\nwhat Alchemy Pay is all about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gold Rocket | Satoshi\nClub: <\/strong>Introduce yourself please. How did you get to be involved in crypto\n& Alchemy Pay? Tell us please about your position in Alchemy Pay?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>I’m the CEO of Alchemy Pay and have been with the project\nsince the early days – start of 2019. Then, our products have not even been\nlaunched and crypto payments is still in its nascent stages where there are few\nactual use cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I came from a background of\nconsulting across the technological and finance sectors, and not too long ago,\nI was a business development manager for a humble startup that pioneered mobile\ncar grooming here in Singapore. I always thought that my client-facing roles and\nstartup experiences instilled in me the importance of focusing on creating\nvalue for our end users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: <\/strong>What is the essence of Alchemy Pay?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>The focus on creating value led to voluntarily put myself\ninto various departments, from products\/operations\/risk management\/ compliance\nto ensure we can deliver a world-class product to our end users which are\nmostly businesses, developers and enterprises with huge merchant networks such\nas Shopify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A short and succinct reply could\nbe our mission – to bridge the gap between crypto and fiat economies. Alchemy\nacts as the bridge between the gap of crypto and fiat to drive\ncrypto\/blockchain usage. Be it in payments, investment or other sectors. our\nwell-established hybrid crypto and fiat infrastructure empowers us to be that\nbridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mary | Satoshi Club: <\/strong>So, you started to develop Alchemy Pay in\n2019, can you tell us what are the most difficult obstacles you have overcome\non the way to today?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>The constant challenge would definitely be regulatory\nenvironments. Crypto regulations have remained fairly grey in most markets and\npoorly defined. Fortunately, our founders have decades of experience in the\npayment industries and understand the kind of KYC\/AML processes we need to\ncollect from businesses we deal with in order to stay compliant. Additionally,\nwe are well connected in this space – this allows us to either partner with\nsomeone with a license to operate, or acquire a license ourselves in a much\nshorter time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gold Rocket | Satoshi Club: <\/strong>Also we would like to know more about\nyour team. Who is on the project team core?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>I’d share perhaps just a few examples since there are too\nmany to list, but effectively, the senior leadership team members either come\nwith a stellar background in the payment space or fast-evolving internet\nproducts. Our chairwoman, Molly Zheng, who was our last CEO has over 20 years\nof payment experience from PayPal, MasterCard and QFPay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our co-founder Shawn Shi, was the\nyoungest ever VP from ZhongAn – which is one of the fastest growing insurance\ncompanies. They are acting as my strategic consultant and provide me with the\nnetworking we need to secure partnerships with industry giants like QFPay,\nShopify, Binance, Huobi and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q1 from Telegram User @andrey_seleznov<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi Alchemy!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d like to learn more about your payment gateway and how it deals with\nprice volatility that is an integral part of the crypto space. Crypto assets\nare volatile, some more some less but we are all too familiar with sudden pumps\nand dumps that can occur on the market in a matter of minutes. How do you solve\nthis problem if conversion rate cannot be maintained during transaction\nprocessing time? Do you warn users beforehand and require acceptance that the\nprice is not guaranteed? Or do you have your own pool that dampens the\nvolatility and allows for a safe transaction completion at an agreed upon\nprice? Or do you stop and fail transactions that encounter high price\nfluctuations and fall outside of the expected price range?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>This is an excellent question. This doesn\u2019t just concern\nrisk management (mitigating volatility) but more importantly, user experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we have to wait for at least 1\nblock confirmation for a Bitcoin transaction, it will take at least 10minutes\nfor the transaction to be approved. Poor experience for both merchants and\npayers = poor use case = low adoption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mary | Satoshi Club: <\/strong>So, you are telling that you have excellent\nspeed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>This requires us to be creative such as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– work 2nd-layer solutions into\nour system, such as accepting Bitcoin over the lightning network<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– selecting only strategic tokens\nto be accepted that has lower block times<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– conducting direct integrations\nwith wallets (i.e. Binance Pay) for instant transactions and zero gas fees<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– preparing a pool of operating\ncapital assets on exchanges to ensure the real-time liquidation. for example,\n0.1ETH is received, instead of sending this 0.1ETH to exchanges to sell into\nUSDT. We prepare ETH in advance on exchanges which is sold automatically via\nAPI integrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many more of such\nstrategies but effectively, we need to place emphasis on user experience,\notherwise, no merchants will want to accept crypto and no payers would consider\npaying with crypto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q2 from Telegram user @Karry1999<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 As\nPayment is one of the popular application areas of the blockchain, and many\ninnovative projects have emerged. Can you give a brief comparison of Alchemy\nand Existing Blockchain Payment Platforms simple words?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Alchemy meets the needs of large-scale commercial application and\nwhat are the payments and settlement modes of. Alchemy platform? Can you also\ntalk about the product features of the platform?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>We’d like to focus on strategies as our main\ndifferentiators. Alchemy Pay focuses on the following: 1. Adding value to our\nmerchants (why should they use our solution) – our hybrid model enables\nmerchants to accept both fiat and crypto. This is important as merchants have\nreservation in just accepting crypto especially at this early stage of crypto\nindustry. Many partners choose our solution because they can accept both fiat\nand crypto, and no matter the payment method – they receive their local fiat\ncurrent in their bank account directly. This is made possible by establishing\npartnerships with exchanges, OTCs and global remittance companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Scaling fast (more merchants\naccepting our solution) – Alchemy has a top-down approach, meaning we work with\nonly the best and largest industries no matter on the merchant side (QFPay\/Shopify\netc.) that gives us access to millions of merchants per integration, or the\nconsumer side (e.g. Partnership with Binance with 60+M users, as well as other\npartnerships that we will announce in the near future). This ensures real world\nuse cases are established quickly and reliably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Low cost to use our service –\nBe it via an API, SDK, Plugin, merchant mobile app, businesses can easily\naccess our service from anywhere around the world. If they want to use our\npayment system, they can do so by downloading the merchant app after conducting\nKYC with us. No need to purchase any devices. To give an idea, our handling\nfees are typically between 1-1.5% compared to 2%-3.8% for credit cards. We also\npay out to merchants in T+1 to 3 while cards are T+7-14 to mitigate any cash\nflow problems to merchants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q3 from Telegram user @Jmagsss<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am very interested on one of\nAlchemy Pay\u2019s feature which is the \u201cAsset Certification and Token Issuance\u201d,\nwhere Alchemy intends to provide certification agencies and token issuers\nassurance by helping the asset owners tokenize their assets, thus, improving\nboth liquidity and tradability amongst buyers and sellers. My question is, does\nthis feature works on both liquid and illiquid assets like commodities, stocks,\ncars, real estate and housing? Also, how would Alchemy pay verify and check if\nan asset owner really does have the certain asset that he\/she wants to\ntokenize? Can you explain the algorithm for this feature?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>This is a VERY interesting subject – which explains why\n2019 and 2020 STOs and security tokens have been hot topics. But regulations\nhave been show stoppers for this revolutionary play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not as simple as algorithm,\nin fact, technical expertise is the easiest piece of the puzzle. Alchemy Pay’s\nteam can easily work with asset holders to determine what platform to issue\ntheir tokens on. But we need other key partners in this whole flow – from\nlegal, brokers, secondary liquidity providers (crypto exchanges\/digital asset\nplatforms), regulatory approvals before anything can happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mary | Satoshi Club: <\/strong>So, you will use third party services?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tan: <\/strong>A quick overview of the flow is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n