Whatever Happened with Alchemy Pay and Binance?

In early August of 2021, Binance announced that it was launching a new service, which would allow users of Binance Pay to make payments to analog merchants using more than 40 cryptocurrencies. The new functionality was driven by a partnership with Alchemy Pay, which calls itself “pioneer of the world’s first payment gateway solution to bridge the gap between fiat and crypto economies.”

In a sense, this wasn’t news at all.

Binance and Alchemy had already announced in October of 2020 that their partnership would allow Binance users to pay with cryptocurrency at Shopify and other merchants.

Alchemy is “the world’s first payment gateway solution to bridge the gap between fiat and crypto.”

But the 2021 press release sent waves through the industry and galvanized investors. The price of #ACH, Alchemy’s utility token, went from 0.00435 USD on August 2nd to 0.159 on August 7th, an astonishing 3,658% return in a few days.

Since then, the price of #ACH has fluctuated but mostly has stayed within a window between 0.06 and 0.09 USD.

Clearly, the market is waiting to find out more. #ACH is hardly going to zero, but it’s also not trending upwards over the past two quarters.

What happened?

What’s going on with Binance Pay and Alchemy Pay?

For now, both partners seem to be plodding along, but hardly setting the world on fire.

As of the date of publication, Binance Pay is not available as an app on the Google Play Store for Android nor on the Chrome Web store. It is also not offered on Apple’s App Store.

There is no Twitter account for Binance Pay, and the Binance accounts seem to mention it rarely (Binance Pay did get a January 5th shout-out from the parent account). (There is also more than one scam coin account using the name.)

Recent Tweets reveal that at least one shop — maximum occupancy, five people — may be using it for retail in Venezuela.

Binance Pay apparently works in Maracaibo!

But for such a massive project from such a massive company, frankly, Binance Pay is not impressing.

How about Alchemy Pay? They’re the tech stars here, creating real utility to meet a real-world need.

Well, um, they’re making great strides in meeting a person from Sudan, apparently. He even wore a suit for the picture.

Two guys, one dressed better than the other.

You know what, Alchemy guys? This is horse-shit marketing, purely optics. The guy is an ambassador (or, more likely, an assistant of some sort). Ambassadors don’t handle national payment system approval. You need to talk to a f*cking minister. And that won’t happen with you sitting on your ass, doing photo ops in your home town with a guy you met at a party.

But wait, there’s more! Alchemy also just announced that it is listed on an exchange that no one uses and no one has heard of! That’s right, #ACH is on CoinEx, the third-most-searched cryptocurrency exchange on Baidu in southern Zimbabwe!

This seems legit.

We’re not calling CoinEx a scam. We don’t even know what the hell CoinEx is. And that’s the problem.

Alchemy has been putting out amateurish marketing content day after day, week after week, just to present the image of being active. Just like every other low-cap coin.

And Binance seems entirely uninterested in Binance Pay.

I hope someone from these companies is reading this, and I also hope it makes them angry enough to do something. Because I do believe in the tech, and in the mission of the joint project. In fact, I hold quite a bit of #ACH myself. But taking a deeper dive into Binance Pay and Alchemy Pay’s partnership has left me feeling covered in muck.

Here’s hoping the two partners get their act together for 2022. The world desperately needs borderless, reliable, and safe crypto payment platforms, as soon as possible.

With anonymity built in, please. Before the guys at CoinEx get all our information.