About ALT 5 Sigma
My name is Vay Tham. I’m the President and CRO at ALT 5 Sigma. In a nutshell, we’re a payment processor that is pure-play crypto. So we process different tokens. The top 15 tokens are what we support. We convert it into fiat and vice versa. It’s very simple. Think of us as a pipe that transacts for our merchants.
I think the other important fact is that we only service B2B customers. So we have 500 merchants on our system. We don’t do retail. We don’t do consumer. So it’s a very focused operation. The other probably really important thing is that we are a public company, one of the few public companies. We are listed on Nasdaq. Our ticker is ALTS.
The first year we processed $39M out of the gate. So that was 2020. Still early days in crypto payments, so we knew that there was a pull market happening there. The big difference is that we’re seeing that the amounts are getting bigger, the frequency and volumes, the TPS are getting much larger so there’s a scaling effect that’s happening. You know, we were just lucky that we got on it very early.
Why Fireblocks
Fireblocks is obviously a big part of our success and our ability to scale. As we evaluated a number of vendors and service providers, the comment that kept coming back constantly was that Fireblocks was the simplest to get up and running. Where we wanted this is the ability to scale quickly and be able to sleep at night with security, I think those are two very important considerations when we were evaluating the system.
We never wanted to deal with wallets. We knew there were guys that were light years ahead, sophisticated people that understood wallets better than we could. Our main business is about onboarding and finding the merchants that want to use it. That’s what we do, and so our businesses was not architecting and providing security for wallets. We know there are better people like you guys that know how to do that. It didn’t make sense for us to build internally.
Using Fireblocks
Our business is very simple because we are a pipe that connects our merchants to Fireblocks to be perfectly honest. And in the simplest terms, to answer your question about how we use Fireblocks, it’s the wallets. But it’s not just the wallets. It’s the security. It’s the support. It’s the reputation. And being a public company, that’s actually much more important. They want to know who our vendors are?. Who are you working with? So for me to be able to stand up and talk to investors and institutional investors and conferences and say, yeah, don’t worry about the security because we’ve got Fireblocks as our partner helping us with on the wallet side, it goes a long way. It’s a checklist item when people hear, ‘Oh, Fireblocks? Good, I’m glad to hear that.’ It’s not some unknown vendor that no one’s ever heard of. I love the fact that you’re building out the ecosystem, and it’s within the Fireblocks community. So it’s that same security that we don’t have to worry about. It’s it’s a comfort level. We understand the APIs, we’re familiar with them, and we know how to integrate.
So that goes a long way when we talk about new customers and new services that we can offer, the confidence that we can say we can deliver this, and you don’t have to worry about it.
Scaling with Fireblocks
The one thing I would bring up is, you know, we turned it on at 2021, but I think our teams were actually talking for about a year before we turned it on. You can appreciate that as a start up at that time with limited resources and capital, we had to make the right decision. So we made sure that time and care was taken to do our diligence, understand what the offering was, before we spent money, spent cash.
And in hindsight, it was 100% the right decision because our ability to scale is due to a large part of your capabilities.
Customer Support
If you were not scalable, we could not be doubling volumes every year. So I think that’s a very important part. But part and parcel with that is, I think, the customer service.
I don’t think I’ve talked a lot about it, but the responsiveness of your teams, your technical teams, and we’re pushing the envelope in 2018 or 2019 in terms of payments early days. I mean, everybody’s talking about it now, but you had to be there 6-7 years ago when no one really cared.
So there were issues, specific technical issues, that in our use cases for our customers are very different. High TPS. Some of our customers, our gaming customers, the withdrawals and deposits are just they’re they’re they’re they’re not something you see every day. There were customers constantly withdrawing and depositing cash in and out. It can stress the system. So those are things that we worked on with your technical team early days, sort of spec that. So, I really do appreciate the customer support and the responsiveness of your teams, from that aspect.
