At the Epicenter Crypto Conference in Lisbon on November 6, 2021, Alchemy Pay Chief of Staff Karmen Tang outlined the company’s strategy for connecting cryptocurrency with traditional payment rails. In her keynote, Tang presented Alchemy Pay as a payments infrastructure provider built to bridge the gap between digital assets and fiat systems, arguing that practical usability remains one of the biggest missing pieces in the broader crypto industry.
Tang said the company’s leadership and founding team draw experience from major traditional payments and technology firms including Mastercard, QFPay, PayPal, and Tencent. According to her remarks, that background has helped Alchemy Pay position itself in a highly competitive crypto payments sector where execution, compliance awareness, and payment network access are critical differentiators.
Expansion Across Countries and Payment Channels
One of the central themes of the presentation was growth. Tang said Alchemy Pay had expanded significantly over the prior year, including gaining access to PayPal payment channels in the fourth quarter of 2020 and later adding Visa and Mastercard payment channels earlier in 2021. She described these milestones as part of a broader push to create a more usable payment bridge between crypto assets and fiat currencies.
By the time of the keynote, Alchemy Pay said it was operating in more than 60 countries and supporting over 200 payment channels for fiat and crypto acceptance. The company framed this network as a direct response to one of crypto’s longstanding structural issues: plenty of speculation and innovation, but still too few real-world payment use cases that are simple enough for consumers and merchants to adopt at scale.
Tang also broke Alchemy Pay’s ecosystem into four major stakeholder groups: customers and consumers, merchants and institutions, transaction service providers, and software technology developers. The company’s broader thesis is that crypto payments cannot succeed through wallets and tokens alone; they require an integrated infrastructure layer that coordinates merchants, software providers, payment processors, and end users.
Partnerships and ACH Token Visibility
Alchemy Pay also used the presentation to highlight its expanding list of commercial and exchange relationships. Tang said the company had built partnerships with Shopify and Binance, two names that carry particular weight because they connect Alchemy Pay to ecommerce and large-scale digital asset activity respectively. These partnerships were presented as evidence that the firm’s infrastructure is not limited to niche blockchain applications, but is intended for broader commercial deployment.
The company’s native token, ACH, was another notable part of the story. Tang said the token’s launch on Coinbase in the summer of 2021 led to a 150-fold increase in value. The token had also become available on other platforms including Gemini, Crypto.com, Poloniex, CoinOne, and Changelly. While the presentation did not go into detailed tokenomics, the growing exchange support was positioned as a sign of increasing market recognition for the Alchemy Pay ecosystem.
Beyond exchange listings, Tang noted that Alchemy Pay’s social reach had expanded sharply as well, with its combined communities across Twitter, Telegram, and Reddit surpassing 200,000 followers. For a payments-focused blockchain company, that kind of audience growth matters not only for token visibility, but also for distribution, developer awareness, and merchant branding.
Tang further revealed that Alchemy Pay had recently established a new joint venture with one of the largest conglomerates in the Middle East. Because of a non-disclosure agreement, she did not name the partner. Even so, the mention suggested that the company was attempting to deepen its footprint in regions where payment modernization, remittances, and digital commerce could create strong demand for hybrid crypto-fiat infrastructure.
A Hybrid Payments Model for Everyday Use
Alchemy Pay’s core proposition is a hybrid crypto-fiat payment solution intended to support both small, everyday purchases and larger commercial transactions. In Tang’s description, the model is designed to let merchants accept crypto more easily while settling in ways that align with existing fiat business operations.
She argued that bypassing costly interchange structures could give merchants a meaningful economic advantage. According to the company, merchants using Alchemy Pay’s model can save 50% to 70% in fees compared with traditional digital payments, while receiving settlement in two to three days. In a market where payment costs and cash flow timing often determine whether merchants adopt new systems, these efficiency claims are central to Alchemy Pay’s pitch.
The broader implication is that crypto payments may gain more traction when merchants do not have to overhaul their operations to support them. Instead of forcing businesses to choose between legacy payment rails and digital assets, Alchemy Pay is attempting to combine the two into a merchant-friendly framework.
White-Label Products and Tokenized Loyalty
Another major part of Alchemy Pay’s strategy is its suite of white-label products. Tang said the company offers tools such as crypto-linked cards and token-based loyalty infrastructure that businesses can brand as their own. Under this model, merchants can issue virtual cards linked to Mastercard and Visa and combine those payment products with branded token rewards for customers.
This approach reflects a wider trend across fintech and blockchain: the blending of payments, rewards, and digital identity into integrated consumer products. Rather than treating tokens only as speculative assets, Alchemy Pay is emphasizing their utility in customer retention and loyalty design. Tang said the company sees significant potential in this area, especially because blockchain-based tokenization allows merchants to rethink how rewards and engagement are structured.
For businesses, white-label issuance can be attractive because it shortens the path to launching branded financial products. For Alchemy Pay, it also expands the company’s role from payments processor to infrastructure provider for a broader set of commerce and fintech applications.
Blockchain Infrastructure Alliance and Interoperability
Tang also addressed a broader challenge facing the crypto payments market: fragmentation. She said the sector still lacks sufficient interoperability and coordination, making it harder for infrastructure providers and application developers to build scalable services across chains and ecosystems.
To address that, Alchemy Pay joined other founding members including Polygon, NEAR, NEO, and Conflux, along with investment veterans and incubators, to launch the Blockchain Infrastructure Alliance (BIA). The alliance was described as a platform for bringing together public blockchains, innovators, and industry participants to support ecosystem-wide development.
According to the presentation, BIA aims to create shared resources for promotion, research, and development, while also establishing ecosystem funds with selected public blockchain partners to incubate projects. The intention is to attract high-quality teams and applications while giving participating blockchains access to more products and services built on their networks.
Tang added that the initiative would work with more than 30 academics from top universities around the world to identify promising areas for innovation and problem-solving. That academic component suggests the alliance is trying to position itself not only as a business network, but also as a longer-term research and ecosystem development platform.
A Broader Case for Crypto in Society
In the closing section of her keynote, Tang framed crypto payments as part of a larger transformation of finance. She argued that cryptocurrency is gradually disrupting traditional finance and opening what she described as a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. But rather than focusing solely on market size, she emphasized themes such as financial empowerment, inclusion, and transparency.
That framing is consistent with Alchemy Pay’s overall message: crypto adoption will depend less on ideology and more on whether blockchain-based systems can make daily financial activity easier for people and businesses regardless of geography or social status. Tang said the company believes this shift will not happen overnight, but that a seamless crypto-fiat bridge can play an important role in making crypto usable in the real economy.
Company Positioning
Alchemy Pay describes itself as an integrated fiat and cryptocurrency gateway solutions provider serving merchant networks, developers, and financial institutions. The company says it supports crypto investment access, commercial transactions, and DeFi-related services for users operating within the fiat economy. At the time of the presentation, it said it had touchpoints with more than 2 million merchants through partnerships with companies including Binance, Shopify, Arcadier, and QFPay.
Viewed in full, Tang’s keynote was not just a company update. It was also a case study in how crypto payment firms are trying to move beyond token markets and into mainstream commerce infrastructure. Whether that transition succeeds will depend on execution, regulation, merchant demand, and user experience. But Alchemy Pay’s message was clear: the next phase of crypto adoption will be shaped by companies that can make digital assets function smoothly alongside the financial systems people already use every day.