Welcome everyone, I'm Giovanni. Welcome to another Cointelegraph AMA. This episode is sponsored by Alchemy Pay, a hybrid fiat and crypto payment gateway. And today I have the pleasure to be joined by the CEO of Alchemy Pay, John Tan. How are you doing John? Hi, I'm good. Hi Giovanni, thanks for having me here. And hi to everybody. Thanks for taking the time to join us today. I'm really excited to share with you what Alchemy is about and what we have installed for you. Yeah, it's a pleasure. And I am also so excited to see how many people in the chat. I think that we're going to have a lot of questions today, so get ready. And yeah, for everyone who is watching, I'm encouraging everyone to ask their questions. Anything that, any curiosity, anything interesting that comes to your mind about Alchemy Pay, just write them down in the chat and I'm going to ask John about those questions. So before getting started and getting into the topic, let's tell a little bit about you, John. What is your background? I heard that you are the CEO of Alchemy Pay, became the CEO of Alchemy Pay not long ago, so maybe you want to share some of your background. Cool. Thanks, Giovanni. So everybody, my name is John. I'm the CEO of Alchemy Pay. And I've joined Alchemy Pay at the start of 2019 as one of the founding team members when I was convinced that blockchain technology will revolutionise the finance and payments industry. And this was way before Alchemy Pay's products and services were ready for launch. So I came from the background of consulting across the technological and finance sector and not long ago I was a business development manager for a humble startup that pioneered mobile car grooming here in Singapore. I always thought that my client-facing roles and startup experiences instilled in me the importance of focusing on creating value for our end-users. This fundamental focus required me to throw myself into various departments in Alchemy from product development to operations to race management compliance just to ensure that we deliver a world-class product to our end-users which are mostly businesses, developers, enterprises with huge merchant networks such as Shopify. And today I'm very honoured to be working with my superb team to lead Alchemy Pay as the CEO in creating real-world use cases and driving the adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology across the world. Awesome, awesome. So thanks a lot for sharing your background. Now I think it's time to get into the meat of the project. So Alchemy Pay is a hybrid fiat and crypto payment gateway. So that already sounds quite enticing and interesting but maybe can you share a brief overview of what Alchemy Pay is about? Sure. So Alchemy Pay was launched in 2018 by a team of payment veterans from global payment leaders such as PayPal, G-Money, MasterCard and Alipay. The like-minded founders were certain that cryptocurrency would play a huge role in the payment space but they were also acutely aware that cryptocurrency payments would not be something that would take over mainstream payment methods such as credit cards and e-wallets overnight. And this is exactly why Alchemy Pay was established to develop the world's first hybrid crypto and fiat payment gateway. So what this means, you know, it sounds complicated but what this really means is that merchants will be able to use one single API, one single payment terminal or a mobile app to accept both cryptocurrency and fiat payment methods. This is absolutely critical to the adoption of cryptocurrency as a form of payment methods. Why you may ask? Because majority of merchants and businesses are reluctant to take on the new payment system just to accept cryptocurrencies. And this is really a major issue even without crypto in the picture. For instance, the next time when you are at a restaurant, you pick over the counter to see the number of payment devices they have. They will have one for credit card, a couple for mobile wallets and a few QR codes displayed for e-wallet payments. What Alchemy Pay does is we aggregate all these mainstream fiat payment channels and we add on cryptocurrency acceptance so that merchants will be willing to use our payment systems. In this way, we are providing value to merchants while preparing them for the global transitions towards cryptocurrency era. Awesome, awesome. And I'm actually quite excited about this project because it has as a purpose, as a fundamental purpose as its goal is to increase mass adoption, not basing itself on rising prices but on real utility. So maybe you can share. Absolutely.  I absolutely agree with what you just said.  I constantly am reminding my team, you should never look at a token price. We should just focus on real world use cases, driving partnerships through conducting integration and token price and investors will come in naturally, organically. We do not have to go and conduct marketing just so that we get more interest from the investors. Right, and now I would like to get more into details about how this payment system works. So apparently you are providing a very wide range of payment services all included in one single product. So maybe you can explain exactly how it works. So for our cryptocurrency acceptance, we are going to be integrated with a network of crypto exchanges, OTC such as the likes of Binance, HopiGlobal with Venex and OTC such as QCP Capital, which is the largest OTC in Southeast Asia and many more and many of such partners to allow us to help merchants convert their inbound cryptocurrencies into fiat currencies in real time to mitigate any volatility risk and pay merchants in local currency that they prefer. Additionally, we are constantly working scaling solutions onto our platforms to create a seamless transaction experience for both parties in payment transaction. This includes second layer solutions such as Lightning Network and other creative solutions such as using multi-signatured wallets, leveraging blockchain analytics to study transaction inputs to be able to approve zero block confirmation transactions. Effectively, when we are compared to other current mainstream global payment methods such as Credit Card that typically charges between 2.5% to 3.5% plus a fixed fee per transaction and they only pay out to merchants in a week or two which can cause cash flow issues. Our payment solution on cryptocurrency acceptance takes away all of this unnecessarily middleman out of the equation. Our merchants can expect to save 60-70% in fees and receive their money as early as the next day. Of course, this is just on the cryptocurrency acceptance for the fiat payment acceptance. As I mentioned earlier, our founders have networks in the payment space for decades and they are able to connect Alchemy Pay to the fiat payment channels. We are able to integrate them and by putting them all into one single solution for the merchants. Yeah, I think that's very exciting because as you mentioned including all these options into one single product may sound very attractive for a lot of users. I'm seeing a lot of comments in the chat and I think that a lot of those comments are focused on the token that is powering your project. Alchemy Pay is powered by a specific token called the ACH which if I'm not mistaken launched not long ago on Coinbase, right? Okay, so now I understand the reason for so much excitement. A lot of people here are asking when will be the Binance listing? When it will be listed on Binance? Well, that's a question that I obviously cannot answer. So when we listed on Coinbase, it came as a surprise to us as well. So a lot of these exchanges, these top exchanges to keep their due diligence process highly confidential. Alchemy Pay, what we would do is we would work together with their research team and their due diligence team to provide all the information that they require to decide whether Alchemy Pay is suitable for listing. But we are not able to share information like this. And in fact, if you were to share information like this, we could end up not being able to list on the exchange, right? So I think we should stay away from clashing like this if we would like Alchemy to be listed on top exchanges like Binance. To make sense, I think that a lot of people here are just so excited that they cannot just wait for that moment when it will be listed on Binance. That's why they are asking even though of course we cannot disclose any information. So I'm curious to know a little bit more if you allow me to ask about this token, ACH. So if you can maybe share more information about the functionality of this token because as you mentioned, it's not about the price, but it's about the utility, right? So I guess that you have some information to share about this token. Sure. The two main features of Alchemy Tokens would be number one would be getting access to all services, meaning that if we were to provide this service to merchants or we provide to a payments company to meet in grid with us, they would have to pledge a certain amount of ACH. And this amount of ACH is dependent on the amount of transactions that they expect and the industry that they are in. The reason why they have to pledge this is because the payment industry is one that is highly regulated. And if we were to provide a cryptocurrency acceptance to a company, for instance, they inform us that they are, during the onboarding process, they inform us that they are going to be using this payment channel for apparel, selling clothings or electronics, but end up using this for online gambling, which could be illegal in the country that they're operating. So we would expect them to pledge this amount of ACH to prevent any fraudulent behaviors, to mitigate such behaviors. And if they were to fought the rules that we have set for them, then this pledge amount of ACH would be confiscated and we would terminate working relationships with them. So that is the first thing. Another thing would be the incentive mechanism, meaning that over 51% of our total supply of ACH is allocated for the incentive mechanism. Our goal is to drive the adoption of cryptocurrencies, as I mentioned earlier. And at this early stage, we need to incentivize users. We need to incentivize payment companies and merchants to start using our payment system. So while they have to pledge a certain amount of ACH, they are able to earn use, let's say if they were to contribute 30% of the total transaction on our network, then they are able to get 30% of the rewards that we have as incentives. We also have other incentives where early payment companies, let's say a payment company joins our network earlier, they are able to get a certain percentage of the allocation for such incentives as well. If you look at it as a whole, it's really to gain access to our services and as well as incentivize usage of our payment system and driving transactions on our network. Of course, there are other use cases such as voting decentralized governance, but I will not go into the details of that since the main focus should be on incentives as well as getting access to our services. Alright, and I see here in the comments a lot of questions regarding the supply. So a lot of people are asking why are you increasing the supplies of ACH token? Is there any reasons for that? The current total supply is at 10 billion and it has always been, the max supply and the total supply is fixed at 10 billion. We are releasing tokens, as I mentioned earlier, the incentives are released by smart contracts on a monthly basis and that has been the case since day one. So on a monthly basis, we will be releasing tokens for the team in order for us to continue running operations, but more importantly, as I mentioned earlier, 51% of the tokens are going to be released on a monthly basis over the next five years to incentivize the transactions on our network. Cool. Now, I would like to switch back to the previous topic when we were discussing the overall competitive advantage of Alchemy Pay. Maybe you are able to tell us who do you see as your main competitors on the market right now and what competitive advantage Alchemy Pay can offer. Maybe you mentioned a few of them earlier, but let's focus now on that topic. So potential competitors and competitive advantages. Okay. Perhaps I can share an example later on, but I would like to start off with, one of the largest advantages of Alchemy Pay is our hybrid crypto and fiat model, which I explained earlier. We are able to develop this because our founders did experience a strong network in the payment industry. So regulations and barriers and trees put up by major payment companies can often slow down and cripple newer companies trying to offer fiat payment channels. And we are able to do so simply because our founders have the network and the connection we did in the fiat payment industry to enable us to integrate such fiat payment channels. And what also stands out about Alchemy is our top-down strategy where we only work with industry leaders that can help drive adoption at scale. For instance, we most recently partnered with Binance Pay to become the exclusive partners to provide Binance Pay to all Shopify merchants across the world. What this really means is that in just one single partnership, one single integration, we are now connecting over 60 million of Binance users to millions of Shopify merchants. For instant transactions with no gas fees for over 40 cryptocurrencies. This was only made possible and came on the back of our partnership with Binance last year where we integrated BUSD and BNB onto our payment system. And we have continuously proved to be a top partner of choice for Binance. So Alchemy really has the experience that we are already proving to top partners that have the merchant networks. And this means that a single integration will bring us hundreds of thousands if not millions of merchants. And I would really like to take a step back at this point in time to implore our viewers and crypto investors to think about the point and value of comparing and debating between which crypto project is better or and eventually pitting projects against each other. The crypto industry is very young and we need to work together to get the rest of the world on board. I see fellow payment projects such as Flexa Network as my peers. Now we may have very different strategies but we have the same goal and objective which is to drive the adoption of crypto payments. And if my peers are doing something better, we will simply learn and adopt that into our strategy. There are hundreds of millions of merchants out there. There's enough of them to go around. But the real question is, are there enough of us payment projects to get these merchants on board? So to end of this question, I wouldn't want to be placed in the position to put down any of my competitors but to say that a lot of our competitors such as Flexa Network, they are doing a good job. And if there is something that they are doing better, we will learn. But I believe strongly in Alchemy's strategy which is one single integration with a top partner to bring us millions of merchants. We believe that having to integrate with multiple parties from the wallet side to the merchant side that could take way too long. What we really need right now is adoption, more merchants getting used to accepting cryptocurrencies. And that is exactly what we are achieving here. Yeah, actually that's very interesting because what made me think about is the situation in El Salvador where now the government of El Salvador decided to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender and it's still unclear whether it's going to make it a successful experiment. So it's still unclear whether people in El Salvador will start adopting Bitcoin and using it as a regular mean of payment. And I'm curious to see what kind of technological solution are they going to implement in order to make people's life easier and enable those payments with Bitcoin. So people there will be... Sorry, you were saying something. I think you froze, John. Sorry, Giovanni, I think I lost you there. Hello, can you hear me? So I'm not sure what it is by connection. Yeah, I can hear you now. I lost you there. You mentioned El Salvador. Yeah, I was just wondering whether your product, I think that your product could be useful for being implemented in a situation like the one in El Salvador. Okay, that's a very good question actually. So in fact, we have been in talks with one of the top... I cannot really go into the details just because this concerns the government and it can be highly sensitive, but we have been in talks with someone from their team that is driving this project. And truthfully, we have informed them that it doesn't matter whether they're going to be using Alchemy's solution, but we are happy to share with them what we have learned in the past couple of years to help them in their journey to adoption of cryptocurrencies. You know, even talking about remittance and payments, that's something that we are very familiar with and so we are guiding them along. But of course, we have also shared with them a case study, a proposition where they can use our solution. But the truth is that El Salvador government has been working with several parties already and bringing Alchemy in at this point in time could disrupt their absence. But so basically what we have shared with them is that merchants, there are many different kinds of merchants at El Salvador. Some of them are large enterprises that have different, for instance, various stores under them or various brands under them and they need a payment system that is able to provide them with a back-end portal to manage these transactions. So Alchemy Pay, we are very familiar with selling large merchants. We have a back-end portal to support a single store. We have a back-end portal to support the entire enterprise or a conglomerate, for instance, so that they can manage their transactions. Imagine one single finance manager is able to use our back-end portal to track down all the transactions that take place using our payment system and is able to track all the settlement easily. So that is something that we are looking at and are discussing with El Salvador. But as mentioned, we are more than happy to be just an advisor to the El Salvador team to make sure that they can achieve the drive blockchain adoption. Yeah, that's awesome to hear that you are involved in all this situation in El Salvador because I think that's a very important testing ground for crypto adoption. So if they succeed and make it real, then maybe other places in the world will follow that example and there will be more and more requests for solutions like yours, possibly. So I wanted to ask you another question from the audience because people are quite interested in a pay card. So they are asking about whether there will be an Alchemy Pay card, I guess with which you can pay with the token that you released. So we really have the technical capability to launch a product. We have already done beta testing and all of this runs very well. But the question is, is it something that Alchemy want to focus on meaning that we want to release our own card for consumers to use that might not be the strategy direction that we want to focus on because most of the solutions that Alchemy are developing are targeted at merchants, businesses and payment projects. The reason why that is so is we are targeting our top-down model meaning that we work with flush enterprises, they have a network of users or they have a network of merchants or businesses. We want to target these people because we believe that that's the fastest way to drive adoption. So the crypto link cards business that we have provided came on the back of business queries on other companies looking to issue their own crypto link cards. So we have now developed this solution and tested it and it has proven to work absolutely perfect. For the next step, what we may be doing is to launch this as a white label service to other projects so that they can issue their own crypto link cards. Or we can even provide this service to financial institutions who are interested in providing their clients with crypto link cards. So it is likely that we will be focusing our attention on providing this as a white label service to businesses. Okay, that's interesting. So instead of having your own branded card, you provide the technology that allows other companies to release their own card. Hi Giovanni. Hey John, was I cut again? Can you hear me? Is it okay? Can you hear me? That is correct. Yeah, that is correct. So we are to focus on to be white label service for the crypto link cards. Awesome. Okay, now I would like to continue with a question regarding the times we live in right now. So the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the transition towards a cashless society. So what impact did the pandemic have on Alchemy Pay's development? Sorry Giovanni, I think I'm losing you again. Right, let me get back to this question. So can you hear me now? Seems the connection is not perfect. So John, can you hear me now? Hey Giovanni, I think I'm losing you again. Yeah, I can see, I can hear you, but seems that we have some connectivity issues. Hey John, can you hear me? John. Hi Giovanni. Hey John, can you hear me? Hello. My connection is a little bit spotty here. I'm in a hotel right now and I think the connection is a little bit spotty. Right, but can you hear me now? John. Hi Giovanni, can you hear me? Yes, I can. What about you? Can you hear me? I can hear you now. I'm so sorry about that. I think my connection is a little bit spotty here right now. Yeah, I mean, I think the problem is... I think it's fine now. I think it sounds like it's fine now. I believe earlier you mentioned about, was it a question on... Could you repeat the last question? I didn't really hear the full question. Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the development of your project. So we saw that the pandemic has accelerated the transition towards a cashless society. So payment, digital payment services are becoming more and more popular. And I guess that that also had an impact on the development of your company. Can't hear me. Hi Giovanni, can you hear me now? Yes, I can always hear you. I'm so sorry to the viewers. My connection is really having some issue. Allow me to reconnect really quickly. Hopefully that will solve that issue. Yeah, let's see if we can fix this. Hi Giovanni. Okay, we are back. I can, I can. We are back here. John, can you hear me? I'm so sorry about that. Yeah, I can hear you loud and clear now. Awesome. Okay. So did you get my question or? Yeah, I did. I got your question. So I believe you mentioned how the COVID pandemic has affected us globally and accelerated the transition towards a cashier society and what are the impacts on alchemy pay and how on our development direction. So when alchemy pay first launched in 2019, I was constantly onboarding merchants where we thought crypto holders would spend their money at. This includes sky bars, clubs, high end restaurants and retail stores. In less than a year, I had onboarded over 3,500 merchants across Singapore and Hong Kong. And I'll be frank that COVID hit us pretty bad because many of our merchants target audiences were tourists. So naturally when the waters were shut, our transaction volume plummeted. However, there are opportunities in every crisis and when one door shuts, another opens. So we began to pivot our efforts towards online transactions just as e-commerce began to take off faster than it really was. For example, we initially were only working with Shopify in a few regions, but today we are serving them globally. And at this moment, we are constantly speaking to traditional payment companies on how we can work together to provide them with crypto acceptance services into their service offering. One integration with them can easily add thousands if not millions of merchants onto our network. Of course, regulatory landscape around the world. With that said, we expect our growth and adoption of our solutions to scale up rapidly in the near future. Okay. Actually now I would like to switch gears and start talking a little bit about how developers are incentivized to work on your platform. So we have been talking a lot about merchants. Now let's talk about how you plan to incentivize developers to come on your platform and build there. John, I think I lost you again. Let's see if we can fix this. Oh, maybe. Hi, so I'm back again. I heard your question. So you were talking about how we plan to incentivize developers to build on our platform. Right. Yes. Sorry. Before you start, if you have troubles with connection, maybe you can try to switch off your camera. Next time you have troubles with connection, you can switch off your camera and we can improve the conversation like that so that it won't be as heavy. Will do. So most of our development are done in-house due to the sensitivities and compliance requirements with the regulators. However, Alchemy Pay acts as an enabler for developers. Many of our clients are actually developers that create software, games, mobile applications that need to receive payments from their end clients. Alchemy Pay powers them with the capability to target customers from all over the world with our hybrid crypto and fiat gateway. But with that said, most of our development are done in-house. And it's mostly due to the sensitivities and compliance requirements, data privacy with the regulators. Thanks. So now I would like to continue a little bit of picking up some questions from the audience. Let's see if there is any interesting question. Actually, people were asking about partnerships. If you could focus a little bit on that. So any upcoming partnerships or something that is going on on that side, would you be able to share? Yeah. So I mentioned earlier that a lot of the partnerships that we are targeting, we are not looking for just the small, medium-sized business. We are really looking for the top businesses. And this would be our strategy in terms of popularizing the use of digital currencies. So when COVID hit us last year, Alchemy Pay's management team were thinking hard about how we can continue to drive adoption. And it was then we realized why crypto adoption has been slow for so many years. If you think about it, only a small percentage of the world is involved in crypto and understands blockchain. We need to make it easy for the rest of the world to get on board the RSS crypto ship. So I recall reading an article about investors who are crypto curious. About 80-90% of these potential investors gave up five minutes into checking out crypto exchanges, which are the mainstream way to buy into cryptocurrencies just because it's so complicated. But they are very telling signs that the rest of the world wants to get on board. I'll share perhaps two examples with you. So the first example would be Squash Cash App. They are making it really easy for their users to buy Bitcoin despite charging a huge amount of fees compared to crypto exchanges. But users are willing to pay for these fees because it's really easy to use. They can buy Bitcoin in under 30 seconds. Another thing to look at is, let's say you have USD today and you want to gain some interest. If you put it into savings account, you're getting so less than 0.5%. If you put it into fixed deposit, you're getting perhaps like 3%. But if you convert that USD into USDT, you can get excess of 10% in use. But why are not more people in the fiat role converting their USD into USDT to gain this yield? Simply because they don't know how to do so. So there's a huge opportunity in this sense where we can connect the fiat role as well as the crypto economy together to drive more adoption and drive more people from the fiat role into the crypto economy. So with the technical infrastructure that we have built, the regulatory experience that we have garnered and our existing fiat payment channels, we are building solutions to help provide simple and seamless way for new investors to buy into crypto assets directly with their local fiat currencies in less than 30 seconds. In addition, we are also helping them gain access to highly lucrative views in the device space without having to deal with any of such complexities. And the reason why I'm sharing this with you when talking about partnership is we already have secured partnerships in all of the business that we launch. We always tap onto partnerships to help us really roll out and scale quickly. So I can't really share this partners at this point in time, but I can tell you that we have two major partnerships that we have secured thus far. And stay tuned, we will be announcing these partnerships in the near future, but these are really massive partnerships that will take us, you know, be able to drive these solutions that we have developed across an entire region. Yeah, and we're going to follow closely the development of your project in the following months for everyone who is curious to check this project, just go to the website. But for now, I would like to follow up with a question regarding the popularization of digital currencies. So basically Alchemy Pay is aiming at increasing the popularization of digital currencies and it's clear that in order to do so, there needs to be some sort of connection between the crypto world and the traditional financial world so that crypto gets adopted and gets into the mainstream. I was wondering, you mentioned stablecoins, you mentioned USDT. So stablecoins are used as a kind of bridge between fiat and crypto, right? So I was wondering, how is your product directed in the sense towards stablecoins? So what is your view of stablecoins and what kind of role do they play in your product? Is your product like a competitor of stablecoins or you are potentially embracing this technology? We are definitely embracing the stablecoin. We are able to conduct a lot of the businesses that we are doing because there's high liquidity for stablecoin. And this works for us in both the payments business as well as the crypto investment businesses that I mentioned to you earlier. On the payment side, the stablecoins are really important to us because we need to sell any inbound cryptocurrencies into USDT or other stable currencies to remove the volatility risk. And at the same time, we would be using this stablecoin going to OTCs to convert them into fiat currencies. So the stablecoin practically provides us with the conduit to remove the risk and convert into fiat currencies which is absolutely necessary for the payments business. On the other hand, for the investment business, we will be getting fiat currency from our users. They could be paying through credit cards, they could be doing through bank transfers. But at the end of the day, if we were to want to help them gain access to defy services, what we need to do is convert that into stablecoins first. So stablecoins really acts as a conduit for the fiat world and the crypto world. And in order to drive the adoption of cryptocurrencies, there needs to be a lot of liquidity for USDT and other stablecoins into the fiat currencies. And that is the trend that we are seeing right now. The amount of liquidity is picking up and we are leveraging that trend to drive the adoption and use cases. That's interesting. So I'm glad to hear that your project is also embracing stablecoin technology as this is one of the most, in my opinion, interesting technologies in the crypto world. So it's good that you are also taking advantage of that. So we have some other questions from the audience here. Maybe you can give us some thoughts about security and stability. So what can bring about security and stability to the ACH investors? So could you repeat that question again? So what news you can give us about security and stability regarding the ACH investors? So I guess the question is how can investors in your token be provided with the security and stability, I guess, in terms of price movements of the token? I think I would first like to touch on the point where Alchemy Pay will hardly ever conduct any trading. We do have to engage a market maker just because the price differences between different exchanges such as 4B and Coinbase is too big and we simply engage a market maker to ensure that they provide liquidity so that traders are able to trade at a fair price and we do not make any money out of it. So we do not control the price at all. This is for sure. But what I can give you in terms of a piece of mind is that we have secured really massive partnerships and at this point in time it is just not the right time to announce. As I mentioned, I think my team has announced on Twitter earlier just a couple of days ago that a lot of our businesses, it takes time to conduct integration. It takes time for us to get the necessary life licenses and whenever Alchemy makes an announcement, it is something massive. The next announcement regarding a partnership is going to be something really massive. Stay tuned to it. I can't really share it right now just because we have signed an NDA with the partner, but it is our largest partnership by far so far. Cool. We were just saying that the price of your token skyrocketed a few weeks ago, so I think that there is a lot of attention on the price. I saw a lot of questions regarding the price of the token in the chat. Some people were asking what is your price target for the end of the year. I guess you are not too eager to give your price predictions for that token, right? The truth is I can't even give a prediction just because I don't even know where is it going. I mentioned to the viewers earlier and you earlier that I have constantly been reminding my team not to focus on the price. We will focus on the actual adoption. You will create the use cases and that's the reason why we are able to scale partnerships like Binance, Pay, Shopify and there are going to be more partnerships. And when I talk about these partnerships, I'm talking about conglomerates. These are conglomerates that own shopping malls, they own properties like hotels and other conglomerate owns banks and real estates. So these are the partners that we are working with. And when these partnerships are announced, investors would understand what we are working towards. We are a project for long-term investors. We are not here for speculation because honestly if you ask me, I do not care about the short-term price movement as well. We really are just focused on driving adoption and use cases. And I believe that that's what investors should be doing as well if they would want to have a sound long-term investment plan. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that the price should be a reflection of the actual utility that you are providing to the crypto space. So guys, if you are curious to know more about the partnerships that Alchemy Pay is building up, just go to the website alchemytech.io and you can find a lot more information over there. So now I would like to focus on the milestones. So when we have an AMA with a project, it's always a little bit unclear what are the milestones that have already been achieved and those that still have to be achieved. So maybe you want to guide us through your milestones that you hope to achieve in the following months and the status of your project currently so that people understand what is the timeline more or less. Sure. I can share with you the next couple of months, milestones because our integration plans and our operational plans have been lined up way beyond 2021. So presently in the next few months, we are integrating with Binance Pay. So Binance Pay is a centralized service we are integrating with them before we can then integrate with Shopify. So in the next two to three months, that is definitely one of our top priority. It's a very major project with us and we believe that with Binance 60 plus million users and Shopify over one million merchants, that will bring a lot of transactions on our network. So that is one of our key priority. And I mentioned to you earlier that adoption is on top of our mind. Our mission is to bridge the crypto and fiat economies. So the strategy shift towards focusing on making crypto investment really easy as well as granting easy access, seamless and easy direct fiat access into defy products is something that we are looking at. And it's something that we have really put together infrastructure and are going to be developing the solutions. It's not that we are developing the solutions without a partner. We have already identified a partner. We are applying for licenses and are about to get the licenses and we will be launching this solution. So right now it's just on us to develop this solution to test it out to make sure that it works well and we will be launching into a market where there's already demand for it. So that is for one region and we are another partner. So this same model targeting on crypto investment as well as defy services is something that would be what we will be rolling out in the next one year. I'm pretty confident it's something that we will be focused on the next one year and there's a lot of inquiries coming in on how we can provide this to other businesses as well. But as I mentioned, we only focus on the really large businesses. We're talking about multi-billion companies that we are going to be working with. When it comes to adoption and scalability, it doesn't make sense for us to integrate and spend too much resources on smaller size SMEs businesses. Sounds exciting. So I think that now I would like to know something about the regulatory aspect of all this because you as a business have quite ambitious aims. So you aim to revolutionize how basically the payment system works. So I guess that regulatory aspects are also important. And lately we have been seeing regulatory action going on in the United States. Some people are a bit worried that there could be tougher regulation crypto businesses. So I saw a question before they were asking whether you have plans to expand your operations in the US and if you are facing any obstacles in doing so. Our home ground is Asia because we have the network, we know how to apply for the licenses. We have been operating this here for a while now. And the next region that we are moving into really fast with the partner would be the Middle East region. And we already identified partners in the European region. However, for the US market, it's a market that we need to enter very carefully just because of the regulatory, how strict the regulators are there as well as how they are constantly evolving. So we do need to identify a partner that we can trust to launch our services into the US. So the stance that Alchemy adopts is to not rush into things. We are serving merchants. Payments is a fundamental element of a business. We shouldn't be rushing into a business telling them over promising our merchants and ending up having to withdraw and leaving them stranded. So whenever we move into a regional market, we have to identify a very strong partner with strong regulatory experiences as well as network before we move into the market. So moving into the US, we could potentially be doing so through our partnership with Shopify by targeting US merchants for a start. All right, so quite cautious approach, which is, of course, I guess the best one, especially when it comes to a tough regulatory environment like the one in the US. So I think that we could move on and wrap things up soon. John, maybe you have some final remarks that you would like to make. So something that our audience should know about Alchemy Pay that we haven't mentioned or something that you would like to underscore. I would really say that Alchemy Pay is more than just a payments company. We are leveraging our hybrid crypto and fiat payment gateway to find ways to drive adoption. And the crypto, the seamless way to invest into cryptocurrencies as well as access to you defy you solutions and products. It's just one of the service offerings that we can explore. There are many other ways that we are currently working on, but due to NDAs with our partners, we are not able to review that just yet. But stay tuned to our Twitter as well as our Telegram page to be finding out what are we working on on the regular basis. Yeah, just stay tuned and I'm pretty excited to see how this project is going to develop because it's about one of the main main problems of the industry, which is actually real adoption and real use cases. So no speculation, no focus on price rising, but real use cases. So it's about money. So it's about how to exchange the things crypto and fiat together in one same product. So if you are curious to know more, just also check the website alchemy.io and you can find more information about the project. So I would like to thank our audience, which today was amazing. We had a lot of people asking a lot of questions. I think that's a good start. Definitely. It means that the project has already a lot of followers. So thank you everyone for watching and thank you, John, for joining us today. Thank you everybody. Thanks for your time. Just to end this off again, you know, we are a long-term project, you know, whatever you have seen so far is simply a mere glimpse into what we have in store for you. The potential of alchemy is much bigger than what you are seeing right now. Cool. Okay. So thank you for everyone for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel. I'm Giovanni, your host. See you next time. All right.


Pat, people are in the locker room. The guys that we've talked to on these Zoom meetings have raved about Ryan Tannehill's skills as a leader and saying what he wants and getting guys to do what he wants them to do. Is that an attribute that you see out of a lot of quarterbacks that you've coached or is that something that only certain ones have and have to develop? I think there's different leadership styles. Everyone's a little bit different. I think the important thing is that it comes from a place that's authentic. Ryan has a really good rapport with his teammates. They listen to him. He's earned that trust. And I really like the way he's stepped up, particularly this year, coming in as the starter and really has done a good job of being an extension of a coach on the field. And that's really what you want from your quarterback. David Bucklar. Pat, I'm curious. Last year, you had Tannehill and Marcus in that room to experience quarterbacks the year before that. Marcus and Gabbard to experience quarterbacks. This year, 2 thirds of that room is really shy on experience. Does that change the way you have to run position meetings right now? Not necessarily. I think Logan, even though he was on our last year, he was in every single meeting. And I really grilled him every day to stay on the plan. And he did. Like he knows this offense. He's done everything we asked him to do. And he and Ryan have a good relationship, too, which helps. So not really anything differently. Obviously, we have a rookie in the room. So there's extra time that needs to be spent with Cole outside of our normal quarterback meetings. And that's kind of what approach we're taking. With Woodside, everybody's expressing a lot of confidence in him. But at some point, you need to see him on the field, right? Or is there anything you see that tells you, yes, this will be fine when he gets his opportunity? Well, you know, we've done everything we've asked him to do. We set an individual development program for Logan a long time ago. And it was demanding of him as far as him mastering the offense, the physical part, when he was healthy. And then his individual plan growing as a pro. And he really hit all those marks. I kind of go back to he's had some pro snaps. And it wasn't the NFL, but he had some pro snaps as a full-time starter in the Alliance. And that really helped him. And certainly, he carried that over the preseason last year. And he did some good things. So he's earned the opportunity right now to earn the job. And the rest remains to be seen. We've had a lot of walkthroughs lately. It's been an acclimation period for the players. And we'll start amping up here a little bit more as far as getting everybody on the field and putting the pads on. Eric? Hey, Pat, kind of just right along those lines. I'm curious what specifically you're looking for in terms of what you're trying to see from Logan in these training camp practices, especially with no preseason games as he tries to cement that backup role for himself. Yeah, consistency, his approach every day, which has been good. Him being able to operate our offense, he's shown the ability to do that. I anticipate him being able to continue doing that. Logan knows it's a day-to-day evaluation. And again, he's earned the opportunity to compete for it. And we all feel good about that. And we'll see how it plays out on the field. Joe Reptia? Yeah, Pat, following up on that as well, you mentioned the plan that you put forth for Logan. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that entails? And maybe if there was a part of that where he really excelled or even, I don't know, exceeded expectations that hasn't been in this position right now? Yeah, you know, we set up, call it IDP. It's an individual development program for all of our players. And they're all different, you know? And a lot of those things are kind of proprietary in nature. But there are things that deal with the physical part, the mental part, and certainly learning how to be a pro. And so we have a lot of resources here for our players, anywhere from nutrition to Chick, his player development, to Frennic and his weight staff, the coaches. There's a lot of resources here. And in Logan's case, he really took advantage of all those resources that we have. And again, he's at a point now where he's going to get an opportunity. And the rest will be really up to him. OK, can you give me one thing? Master the offense. Master the offense. That's for any quarterback. It's a challenge. And then mastering it and then performing it in a timely matter is not for everyone. If it was easy, anyone could do it. So far, Logan has done a good job of that. Thank you. Luke. Hey, Pat, appreciate the time. As you've seen Ryan grow with this team throughout this year and last year as he went from backup to starter, what have you seen him do to sort of take control and, I guess, make this team his own as he's moved into a bigger role? I think he stepped into a situation when he was the backup. And then stepped into the starting role. And I think you'd have to ask Ryan, but I've heard him say that he just wanted to perform with actions. Less words, more actions. And the way he played really solidified him, being able to come in now and really have a little bit more of a voice that he feels comfortable with. And it's been really good.  When he makes a decision in the passing game, that falls out. That's something we really strive for in our room. And he's physically tough. And the leadership has just been excellent. And his approach every day, he's the same guy every day. And when you're the same guy every day, and the way you approach things, not just on the field, it's you build trust that way. And so the players trust him. And we certainly are glad he's here. Not even just with Ryan, but with quarterbacks in general, what does it look like as they find the balance between demanding what they want and figuring out what they want with game plans and things like that versus listening to coaches and listening to teammates? What does that balance look like? Well, it's a careful balance. But the one thing that I really like and that Arthur leads us as far as our offensive staff is that there's open communication, I think, in our quarterback room. It's more of a collaboration. We talk about a lot of different concepts and things and have conversations almost like a business meeting. And some things stick on the wall. Some things don't. And then we put it together and to a common goal of what we're trying to achieve for that particular play or that game. And so it's really, it's almost like a business meeting in the quarterback room and with Arthur in a real positive, constructive manner. Terry McQuarran. Pat, how important is it for a quarterback to have a safety valve type of guy that he knows he can get the ball to and he's going to move the chains. He's going to catch it. He's going to pick up the crucial third down plays like that. I guess Adam Humphries is kind of set for that role this year. How important is that type of guy to every quarterback? I think it's trust and that's huge. The relationship between quarterback and receivers is an intimate one. And there's body language involved in it and knowing what a guy is going to do on a particular, particular route. There's consistency in the receivers play and the quarterback play where they believe in trust in each other. That communication goes on quite a bit and that goes back to leadership from the quarterback position is involving those conversations and those sidebar dialogues that really create that trust. And when you have that, any quarterback will tell you that's when it really gets fun because the ball will come out a tad earlier and you have more success when those kinds of things happen. Paul Caharsky. Hey Pat, good to see you. Two quick ones if I may. Wondering if there was any one specific technical thing that Ryan worked on in the off season, no matter how small. You know, he's one of the more sound quarterbacks that I've coached as far as his technique and he is very critical of his own technique and is constantly monitoring it. He practices very, very hard in our individual drills and he is very consistent. I think sometimes I think, you know, Ryan, sometimes we need him to know when the journey is over on a play. We don't want him to get some of those hits he takes. That's one thing that if he can to kind of know when the journey is over on a play and maybe throw it away or maybe slide if need be. But other than that, he's really technically sound. Wondering too about Shane. You saw him as a somewhat younger man in Houston. You surprised at all at his progression or is this what you expected for him in becoming kind of Mike's right hand man and he seems to be on kind of a fast track? I think it's awesome and he's prepared for it. He knows this defense. He was in Houston. I was with them. I was there three years. I was with Bo for two years there and he's definitely ready for it. I'm excited for him. He's an asset to have and we're really, I'm glad he's here and I'm glad he's doing it. He deserves it. What is it about him? He have some extra mojo magic, all those guys that seem to have something. Shane's intelligent. He's a great teacher and the players respect him and he's certainly been around Graves for quite a while and understands what Graves wants really, really well. So I'm glad he's here and I'm glad he's doing it. I'm excited for him to do it. Thanks a lot. David Boepler. Hey, you mentioned Tana Hill's decisiveness. I'm curious based on your experience with him, do you have a sense of how much of that's a product of experience and how much of that or versus how much of that is just a personality trait? I think it's a little bit of all the things you just said and I think it's a belief in confidence in the system and we all have a lot of confidence in what we do offensively and Ryan does too. And I just think that it's just a lot of what we do is in the passing game is his own rhythm and he certainly is built for that. And it's fun to watch, you know, if Paul comes out, he makes a decision that Paul comes out because he knows where he wants it to go and he knows the system. So all those things kind of work together. How often does he know even before the snap where he's gonna go with the ball, do you think? Yeah, you'd like to. I joke with the quarterbacks that they have to use the force, you know, Star Wars. So, but no, we try to do a lot of film study. We try to game plan for what we're trying to accomplish on each particular play and there are some plays where as a quarterback, you know the look you're getting and that helps the ball come out and that comes with training and studying and preparation and as a quarterback when you have the answers to the tests for the ball snap, that's the greatest feeling in the world. We've got a couple of new people to the group so we may have some repeat questions here so bear with us. John Lennon. Hey, Pat, how are you? John. Hey, just wanted to ask you, you guys were so good last year in terms of getting yards after the catch. How did Ryan Tannehill factor in that and is it reasonable to think that could be, you know, reproduced again? I think it's a combination of a lot of things, you know. One is the execution of the play, you know. Protection up front, the ball coming out in the timely manner, receivers getting the ball a little bit earlier and playing with a lot of play strength and then, you know, Coach Moore and Arthur really do a great job and Coach Rable sets its own that, you know, to finish longer than the guy with the ball. So our receivers and everyone blocking downfield and really, you know, finishing to the echo of the whistle and people getting blocks downfield and, you know, it takes all 11 guys. And when you play like that, then, you know, good things can happen and you can get the explosive plays that you mentioned. Yeah, and just one follow in a bit of a different direction on the Logan Woodside front. The fact that there are no pre-season games this year, I guess obviously makes a little bit harder for evaluation, but do you feel that, you know, last year and seeing him in the pre-season last year as well, does at least give you some working knowledge of him, you know, on a bigger stage? Yeah, we have, you know, there's some evidence of him being able to produce and operate the offense. He also had some snaps as a starter in the Alliance, you know, he started, did some good things there and had to live that life as a professional starter in that league. So there's some evidence there and, you know, really, he's really done everything we've asked of him, you know. There was a lot of things we asked of him to accomplish over the past year and really longer than a year because he was here, I think in 18 for a little while in practice squad. And he's really done all the things we've asked him to do. But again, he knows it's a day-to-day situation as far as competing and he's being evaluated every single day. And right now he's put himself in a position to have an opportunity and we'll see where it goes from there. Got time for maybe a couple more, Taran. Good to see you, Coach Pat. My question in regards to the continuity you guys have, you know, it's been maybe three years or so since the same quarterback and OC are returning for a following year. How much does that play into Tannehill, you know, being able to play fast and make those decisions that needs to happen to execute the offense? Well, it certainly helps, you know.  So, you know, these are things to build on and, you know, you can kind of focus in on little details of each play, of each concept. You can tinker with some things and it helps as far as teaching. And with the abbreviated kind of different offseason we had, that was virtual, that certainly helps. So, you know, we're excited about getting going, we're excited about getting kind of going full speed around the field. It's kind of been an acclimation thing going on, getting the players up to speed physically and it'll be fun to kind of get everybody out there and put some pads on and get rolling. Thank you. Jim, why did you have one? We got time for one last one if you got one. I did, and how are you doing, Pat? Appreciate your time. Good to see you. Two. I had some for Woodside, but you've hit on him a lot. I'm gonna ask you about Cole McDonnell, I'm sorry if you haven't asked about him previously, but what have you seen from him and what kind of challenge does he face in a camp without a preseason and when you're gonna be need to get reps for some other guys? Yeah, Cole's working hard. It's hard being a rookie quarterback and then when you have a virtual offseason, you know, you're not able to get your hands on that rookie quarterback in the offseason for that nine week program that typically you have. And so he did a good job in the virtual sessions and now physically, you know, he's just kind of getting going here. So he's coming from a very different system and you know, it's a day-to-day won't get 1% better and that's kind of the role for him right now and it's just really day-to-day and just kind of getting him up to speed. And how encouraged were you that Logan kind of stepped up and helped lead some of the guys in the workouts here in Nashville and maybe not surprise you? You know, it was awesome.  And you know, he did like he worked extremely hard. He got a place right down the street. So he was nearby and he was able to get the guys together when a lot of guys couldn't be together and throw and he trained and he changed his body and he's done the things that we've asked him to do. So now he's put himself in a position to compete and it's a day-to-day thing and evaluation for him and he knows that.