Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volumes, continues actively expanding into the crypto payments industry through a new crypto-to-fiat integration.
The company announced Tuesday a partnership with crypto-fiat hybrid payment platform Alchemy Pay to enable peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto payments at over 2 million global merchants through its payments application Binance Pay.
The new integration will allow users and merchants to pay and accept payments using 40 supported cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) in 18 countries where Alchemy Pay operates. Binance Pay users will be able to pay across merchants of Alchemy Pay’s partners, including e-commerce giant Shopify, software technology company Arcadier, mobile payment provider QFPay and others.
Founded in 2018, Alchemy Pay operates a global crypto-fiat payment gateway through 300 fiat and crypto payment channels in 65 countries, according to the company’s website. The company’s merchant networks also include Hong Kong’s biggest furnishing company Pricerite, Singapore’s Cé La Vi, Canadian footwear brand Aldo and Midwest Global Asia taxi services.
The firm is also running its own token, Alchemy Pay (ACH), an Ethereum-based token used to incentivize the ecosystem and access to the network’s consumption and governance. The ACH token has been seeing a skyrocketing surge recently, with its price rising more than 1,680% over the past 14 days.
At the time of writing, ACH is trading at $0.024, up nearly 100% over the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko. On Tuesday, the token was listed by major global crypto exchange Coinbase.
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Alchemy Pay CEO John Tan said that Alchemy Pay’s partnership with Binance “significantly expands the practical backbone applications we build between the crypto and fiat worlds.” He also noted that the total value of the crypto market was “less than a tenth of a percent of what it is today” when Alchemy Pay was launched.
As previously reported, Binance Pay is a contactless P2P crypto payment feature on Binance, allowing users to send and receive crypto payments around the world. The app was launched in public alpha this March and is available to all eligible Binance users.