The Hong Kong-based crypto remittance company announced signing a final agreement with Vitaxel to enter Malaysia. It also participates in the second round of the Korean K-Startup Grand Challenge.

According to the announcement on Bitspark’s blog, the two companies, which signed a Memorandum of Understanding in June, have worked hard to conclude a master agreement and have now “a clear plan on rolling out services in Malaysia soon and potentially further afield.”

Bitspark, founded in 2014, was the first company to offer brick-and-mortar bitcoin-powered remittances reaching to people who never heard about bitcoin. The first remittance corridor established in November 2014 connected Hong Kong with the Philippines, followed by the Hong Kong – Indonesia corridor in January 2015. Currently, Bitspark is also present in Vietnam and offers more than 100,000 cash pickup locations. In May 2015, it shut down its bitcoin exchange services to put all efforts into the remittance platform.

Its alliance with Malaysia-based Vitaxel Group, specialised in e-commerce and entertainment, seems only natural: Malaysia, with its great number of guest workers from other Asian countries, is one of the top remittance-sending countries.

Bitspark has also become, together with 84 other startups from all parts of the world, a semi-finalist of the South Korean government-financed K-Startup Challenge. The round two will take place in the second week of August in the Pangyo Techno Valley located in the southern part of Seoul. Only 40 startups will be chosen for the final part of the competition, to start at the end of August. Twenty winners will be encouraged to develop their business in Korea and receive financing for a six-month period.

Alexey Tereshchenko