Rebit.ph

Rebit.ph was founded in March 2014 by John Bailon, Miguel Cuneta, and Jardine Gerodias under holding company Satoshi Citadel Industries (later restructured as SCI Ventures Inc.), building one of the Philippines’ earliest Bitcoin-based remittance services aimed specifically at overseas Filipino worker (OFW) families sending money home.

The platform let senders convert fiat currency to Bitcoin abroad and have it converted back to pesos for pickup or bank deposit in the Philippines, positioning Bitcoin as a lower-cost rail for cross-border remittances rather than as a speculative asset in itself — a genuinely early thesis for a Philippine company to build a real product around in 2014.

Satoshi Citadel Industries raised a seed round in 2016 backed by K Venture Group, the venture arm of Korea’s Kakao. Rebit.ph’s original platform was discontinued in October 2020, the broader service fully stopped by January 2021, and the company formally ceased operating by the end of 2022, with its Virtual Asset Service Provider license not renewed in 2023 — a quiet wind-down of one of the country’s earliest crypto-remittance pioneers.

OFW families receiving remittances from abroad have historically paid high fees and waited days through traditional money-transfer operators; Rebit.ph's thesis was that Bitcoin could serve as a faster, cheaper cross-border transfer rail beneath a simple fiat-in, fiat-out user experience.

Overseas Filipino workers sending remittances home, and their families in the Philippines receiving pesos, without either side needing to understand or hold Bitcoin themselves.

Rebit.ph was one of the very first Philippine companies to build a real remittance product around Bitcoin rather than treating it purely as a trading asset, years before most Filipinos had heard of cryptocurrency, and it operated under an actual regulatory relationship with the BSP's Virtual Asset Service Provider framework rather than off the regulatory grid.

Discontinued its original Rebit.ph platform in October 2020, fully stopped operating by January 2021, and formally ceased under parent company SCI Ventures by the end of 2022, after not renewing its Virtual Asset Service Provider license in 2023.