Rebit, the product of the largest Philippine bitcoin service provider Satoshi Citadel Industries (SCI), has gone into partnership with California-based global transaction network and mobile money transfer app ZipZap.

The partnership is aimed at allowing the Canadian Filipinos to connect their ZipZap apps to their bank accounts and send money back to the Philippines using their smartphones without any special knowledge about the Bitcoin transfer mechanism. For these ends, Bitcoin blockchain technology which includes tamper-proof data structure is going to be used.

It is believed that said technology will allow the overseas Filippinos save not only their time and effort but also their money, as the fees ZipZap-Rebit are planning to introduce are said to be much lower than those imposed by ordinary remittance systems.

For ZipZap, which raised $2.2 million in venture capital funding last year, this area of activity has become a priority recently, with a special mobile app for migrants' money transfers having been introduced in January, 2015. The application, Zed, is ambitious enough to claim it has all the potential to become the easiest way of sending money starting from $5 anywhere around the globe at low conversion rates and no additional costs.

Entering the partnership, the Rebit.ph, in its turn, hopes to control some significant share of the $2-billion Canada-to-Philippines remittance market which is believed to be on the rise, as the remittances continue to be a major contributor to the Philippines’ GDP and the remittance volumes are not likely to go down.

Still, the Rebit is not the pioneer of the bitcoin remittance in the Philippines, as earlier this year a Manila-based bitcoin startup Coins.ph has launched Teller — a bitcoin exchange service enabling money remittance without any bank account.

Maria Rudina