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The largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Binance, has joined forces with Alchemy Pay, a crypto-fiat hybrid payment platform, to streamline peer-to-peer (P2P) payments. A press release unveiled this news on August 3, noting that the firms intend to build a payment bridge between crypto and fiat through the Binance Pay wallet. In so doing, the companies will facilitate seamless payments for both users and merchants by eliminating handling fees incurred while using crypto.
According to the news release, Binance will integrate Alchemy Pay’s hybrid crypto-fiat platform, allowing users and merchants to pick the payment options they prefer. Reportedly, the platform supports more than 40 digital assets in 18 countries.
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This integration is set to help Binance Pay gain broader adoption through Alchemy Pay’s network of merchant partners, which include Shopify, and QFPay, Hong Kong-based Pricerite, Singapore’s Ce La Vi, and Canadian footwear brand Aldo, just to mention a few.
Commenting on this partnership, John Tan, Alchemy Pay’s CEO, said Alchemy went live in 2018 intending to build a bridge between crypto and fiat. He added that this partnership significantly expands the practical backbone applications between the crypto and fiat sectors, which the company has been developing.
Break Boundaries Together
It is worth noting that this partnership is not the first time Binance and Alchemy Pay are coming together to help make crypto more mainstream. In April 2020, the companies joined hands in a deal that sought to increase the widespread adoption of BUSD, Binance’s stablecoin, in Singapore. The agreement involved Alchemy Pay enabling the use of Binance USD (BUSD/USD) in a variety of merchant stores, including 2,000 high-end commercial vehicles and hundreds of offline stores.
At the time, Binance disclosed that this partnership was part of ongoing efforts to make BUSD a mainstream payment option in the crypto space and physical and digital payment points across the globe.
A year and four months later, BUSD has grown to become one of the leading stablecoins in the crypto market. The coin has a market cap of $11,977,496,650.10 (£8,588,643,635.40), which makes it the 11th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. BUSD’s capitalization also makes it the third-biggest stablecoin after Tether (USDT/USD) and USD Coin (USDC), which have market caps of $61,996,409,143.00 (£44,455,455,122.13) and $27,439,854,322.00 (£19,676,159,139.40), respectively.