A Short Story from the CEO of Alchemy — Justin Jung

When I was a student at Penn St., the funniest thing kept happening to me. All my friends kept borrowing money from me. I’m from Korea.

This seemed strange to me. I always thought Americans had so much money. Why is it that kids sent off to college didn’t have enough money to buy macaroni and cheese — let alone books, rent, computers, tuition. In time, I came to see this wasn’t’ a coincidence but an epidemic. American college students are flat out broke. And student debt — now more than $1.5 trillion — is crippling the US economy, dashing hopes, and dreams, and one of the worst stumbling blocks this great nation faces.

I started Alchemy Coin for a simple reason: to bring borrowers and lenders together in a peer-to-peer network that would free up cash for those that need it most and are unable to access credit for any number of reasons, and match them with lenders who want attractive yields to generate cash on their investments. Building the Alchemy Coin platform has been a daunting task of regulatory hurdles, blockchain challenges, and coding intricacies, but our work is almost done. We expect to execute our first loans in 2019, and we have decided overwhelmingly as a team that we want to target small student loans to demonstrate that our model is sound. We recognize that demonstrating an ability to grant loans in the United States, to those with no credit history is a challenge.

We are up to that challenge. We are confident our platform is viable, lenders will come forward to provide capital, and we are highly confident student borrowers are much more responsible than people think. They are denied credit because they don’t have credit; it’s a vicious cycle. It’s time for change. And Alchemy Coin is ready to bring that change to the masses.