BitX Expands to Indonesia with Fixed-Price Bitcoin Exchange

By Jon Southurst

Emerging market-focused bitcoin firm BitX has opened an office in Jakarta, Indonesia, bringing its services to a population of 252 million people in one of the world's fastest-growing economies.

In keeping with its other branches in places like Kenya and Malaysia, BitX Indonesia will recruit local staff to provide user support in a language and style familiar to the region's customers.

BitX's service in Indonesia will center around a market-price buy-sell exchange, which CEO Marcus Swanepoel framed as being the most suitable service for the market.

BitX expects most customers to access the service through its mobile apps for Android and iOS, launched last November.

Customers can use the apps not only to buy and sell bitcoin in Indonesian rupiah on BitX's local exchange, but also to sign up for new accounts and complete the 'know your customer' (KYC) registration process.

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Why Bitcoin Remittance Services Should Leave the 'Bitcoin' Part Out

By Luis Buenaventura (@helloluis)

Luis Buenaventura is head of product at Satoshi Citadel Industries, the parent company of Rebit.ph, a Philippine bitcoin-based remittance service.

The sister cities of Hong Kong and Macau currently house more than 200,000 migrant Filipinos between them.

The breakdown is fairly homogenous in terms of occupation: the largest group consists of 160,000 Filipinas working on Foreign Domestic Helper visas on the Hong Kong side, with a little under 17,000 on the Macau side.

Together, the two groups transferred over $380m back to their families in the Philippines in 2013, amounting to between 30% and 40% of their collective wages.

The remittances industry has become something of an obsession of mine over this last year, as we have begun the long process of thoroughly educating ourselves on the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) situation around the world and rolled out our bitcoin remittance service.

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