Alchemy Pay used a keynote appearance at the Epicenter Crypto Conference in Lisbon to outline its latest expansion across the crypto-fiat payments market, presenting itself as a bridge between digital assets and traditional money. In the presentation, Chief of Staff Karmen Tang described the company’s growth, merchant strategy, and broader infrastructure ambitions as it seeks to make cryptocurrency payments more practical in everyday commerce.
Tang said the company’s leadership and founding background draws heavily from established payments firms including Mastercard, QFPay, PayPal, and Tencent. That experience, she argued, has given Alchemy Pay an edge in navigating both merchant networks and the operational realities of payment processing, two areas that remain major barriers for crypto-native payment providers trying to scale.
Expansion Across Payment Rails and Markets
According to the presentation, Alchemy Pay has expanded rapidly over the past year. Tang said the company gained access to PayPal payment channels in the fourth quarter of 2020 and later connected to Visa and Mastercard payment channels earlier in the year. It now says it is active in more than 60 countries and supports over 200 payment channels for both fiat and cryptocurrency acceptance.
The core idea behind the platform is to address one of the industry’s persistent weaknesses: the shortage of real-world use cases for digital assets. Rather than treating crypto solely as an investment product, Alchemy Pay is trying to turn it into a practical payment layer that can interact with existing fiat-based commerce. In Tang’s framing, the company’s role is not simply to process crypto transactions, but to connect two financial systems that often operate separately.
She also broke Alchemy Pay’s ecosystem into four major groups: customers and consumers, merchants and institutions, transaction service providers, and software technology developers. That structure reflects a broader infrastructure thesis. Instead of focusing only on consumer wallets or merchant checkout, the company is trying to build a network that includes the technical, institutional, and commercial participants needed to move payment adoption beyond isolated pilots.
Partnerships and Token Visibility
Alchemy Pay pointed to a string of partnerships as evidence of growing traction. Tang said the company has worked with Shopify and Binance, two names that significantly extend its reach across e-commerce and digital asset markets. The company also highlighted the listing of its ACH token on Coinbase during the summer, an event the article says was followed by a 150-fold increase in value.
Beyond Coinbase, ACH is described as being supported by Gemini, Crypto.com, Poloniex, CoinOne, and Changelly. For a payments-focused crypto company, exchange support matters not only for token liquidity but also for brand visibility and ecosystem participation. The article also notes that Alchemy Pay’s social community surpassed 200,000 followers across Twitter, Telegram, and Reddit, suggesting that interest in the project has expanded alongside its commercial footprint.
Tang further revealed that Alchemy Pay had recently established a joint venture with one of the largest conglomerates in the Middle East. The partner was not named due to a non-disclosure agreement, but the reference suggests that the company is seeking regional expansion through large institutional relationships rather than relying solely on retail-led growth.
A Hybrid Model for Crypto and Fiat Payments
A major theme of the keynote was Alchemy Pay’s hybrid payment model. The company says its system can support both small and large everyday crypto payments while settling value in a way that remains useful for merchants operating in fiat economies. This kind of hybrid structure is central to many attempts at commercial crypto adoption: consumers may want to pay in digital assets, but merchants often prefer stability, familiar accounting, and predictable settlement times.
Tang claimed that by bypassing costly interchange structures, merchants using Alchemy Pay can reduce payment fees by 50% to 70% compared with traditional digital payment options. She also said merchants receive funds within two to three days. If those economics hold at scale, lower fees and clear settlement windows could become one of the company’s strongest value propositions, especially in sectors where payment costs are already under pressure.
White-Label Products and Tokenized Loyalty
In addition to payment acceptance, Alchemy Pay is building white-label products designed for businesses that want to launch branded financial experiences without developing the infrastructure from scratch. Tang said the company offers products such as crypto-linked cards and systems that allow businesses to issue their own loyalty tokens.
Under that model, merchants can issue virtual cards connected to Mastercard and Visa and reward users with branded token incentives when they spend. The concept ties together payments, customer retention, and tokenization. For businesses, that could mean a more flexible version of loyalty points; for blockchain companies, it represents another path for bringing token utility into real-world customer engagement rather than limiting tokens to trading activity.
Tang said Alchemy Pay sees significant opportunity in this area, particularly because blockchain-based tokenization can give merchants more direct control over incentive design and community-building strategies. The white-label approach also broadens the company’s addressable market by appealing not just to crypto-native platforms but also to conventional businesses interested in integrating digital assets into their brand ecosystems.
Building Broader Blockchain Infrastructure
The keynote also moved beyond payments into industry coordination. Tang argued that the crypto payments landscape remains fragmented and lacks comprehensive interoperability. To address that, Alchemy Pay joined founding members including Polygon, NEAR, NEO, and Conflux, along with investors and incubators, to form the Blockchain Infrastructure Alliance (BIA).
According to the article, the alliance is intended to create synergies across the blockchain sector by pooling resources for promotion, research, and development. It also plans to create ecosystem funds with selected public blockchain members in order to incubate projects and strengthen cryptocurrency functionality. That suggests a strategy that reaches beyond processing transactions toward shaping the broader networks, services, and applications that could make crypto payments more usable.
The BIA initiative is also expected to involve more than thirty academics from leading universities worldwide, who will help identify development opportunities and practical solutions. Bringing academic participation into the alliance may help the group evaluate infrastructure gaps more systematically, though the long-term impact would depend on whether those research efforts translate into deployable products and active developer adoption.
The Broader Case for Crypto Payments
Tang framed crypto payments as part of a larger transformation in finance. In her conclusion, she argued that cryptocurrency is gradually disrupting traditional financial systems and opening up a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity with broader social benefits. Her vision emphasized financial empowerment, inclusion, and transparency regardless of geography or social status.
That message reflects a common ambition across the digital asset industry, but Alchemy Pay’s pitch is notably grounded in payments infrastructure rather than ideology alone. Instead of describing an entirely separate financial system, the company is trying to improve how crypto and fiat interact in the current commercial environment. That includes acceptance rails, merchant tools, settlement mechanisms, white-label products, and ecosystem partnerships.
According to the company description included in the article, Alchemy Pay is an integrated fiat and cryptocurrency gateway solutions provider serving merchant networks, developers, and financial institutions. It says it supports over 60 countries, 200 payment channels, and reaches more than 2 million merchants through partnerships with firms such as Binance, Shopify, Arcadier, and QFPay.
Whether crypto payments can move from niche usage to routine consumer behavior remains an open question for the entire industry. But Alchemy Pay’s presentation makes clear that the company is betting on a hybrid model: one where blockchain-based assets do not replace fiat overnight, but instead become usable through the same merchant and payment infrastructure people already rely on. In that sense, its strategy is less about forcing a break from traditional finance and more about making the transition between the two systems increasingly seamless.