Creditors have been waiting for 10 years since the collapse of the Mt.Gox exchange.
On June 24, the Mt.Gox trustee announced that it would begin repaying Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in early July 2024. Data shows that as of June 24, the Mt.Gox trustee held approximately 140,000 Bitcoins, worth approximately US$9.26 billion.
The huge BTC compensation plan has long been the "Sword of Damocles" hanging over the crypto market. Since the Mt.Gox trustee holds a large amount of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, its repayment work may lead to a large number of tokens being sold on the market, thereby bringing selling pressure to the market. This selling pressure may cause the price of Bitcoin and other related tokens to fall.
One of the biggest Waterloos in the history of the cryptocurrency world
According to the announcement, the trustee is ready to initiate the repayment process to the cryptocurrency exchanges in accordance with the requirements of the rehabilitation plan. The trustee stated that it has completed the confirmation and exchange of required information with the relevant exchanges to ensure the security and compliance of the repayment. The specific repayment will be carried out according to the order in which the information exchange of each exchange is completed.
According to the repayment plan, Mt.Gox needs to distribute 142,000 BTC, 143,000 BCH and 69 billion yen to creditors.
Mt.Gox was once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It was founded by Jed McCaleb in 2010 and acquired by French developer Mark Karpeles in 2011, becoming a trading platform focused on Bitcoin. In 2013, the price of Bitcoin soared from $13 to $1,100, and Mt.Gox quickly developed into the world's number one Bitcoin trading platform. At its peak, it occupied 70% of the Bitcoin trading market share.
However, the good times did not last long. On February 7, 2014, Mt.Gox suddenly announced that it would stop all Bitcoin withdrawals. The reason at that time was that it needed to sort out the currency process, so users did not pay much attention. But just 17 days later, Mt.Gox not only suspended all transactions, but even the website could not be opened.
Later, an internal company document revealed that hackers attacked Mt. Gox and stole 744,400 bitcoins from Mt. Gox customers and another 100,000 bitcoins owned by the company, bringing the total amount of stolen bitcoins to 850,000, worth about $450 million at the time. Shockingly, this large-scale attack happened more than once. As early as 2011, Mt. Gox had lost up to 80,000 bitcoins.
Under the influence of this incident, the crypto market fell into a crisis of confidence, and the price of Bitcoin directly fell by two-thirds. Mt.Gox filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018 and initiated rehabilitation procedures to compensate affected creditors.
It is worth noting that until now, the market still does not know the whole story of the Mt. Gox incident. Karpeles, then CEO of Mt. Gox, was charged with fraud and embezzlement in early 2015. Before he was imprisoned, he took the initiative to admit that he had found 200,000 missing bitcoins and stored them in cold wallets, but when he tracked the wallets later, he found that the bitcoins were evenly distributed to 100 people's wallets after a series of operations.
In 2019, Mt. Gox recovered a total of 141,000 bitcoins. The court ruled that this huge sum of money be delivered to a trust for safekeeping. The trust manager is Nobuaki Kobayashi, who will coordinate the distribution time among creditors.
In 2022, Mt.Gox announced that the Bitcoin repayment procedure was accepted by the court. In September 2023, Mt.Gox extended the deadline for basic repayment, early lump-sum repayment and mid-term repayment, which was originally scheduled for October 31, 2023, to October 31, 2024. According to the repayment notice issued by Mt.Gox at the end of 2023, Mt.Gox provided creditors with two repayment plans: basic repayment and proportional repayment.
In December 2023, several creditors, including Yuzo Kano, the founder of Japan's leading exchange bitFlyer, said on social media that they had received partial compensation in Japanese yen, without compensation in tokens such as BTC. In January 2024, a creditor in Poland also said that he had received repayment, saying that 80% of his claim was returned in US dollars via bank transfer.
Although creditors are unlikely to sell the repaid Bitcoin collectively, and repayment does not necessarily equate to selling pressure, creditors may choose to continue holding, but this may be an important factor that makes the market uneasy in the short term.
Investors still need to be wary of risks
After the bankruptcy of Mt.Gox, the crypto market fell into a two-year slump. History always repeats itself. In 2022, as the second-ranked exchange in the crypto market at the time, FTX's collapse once again triggered a crisis of confidence in the entire cryptocurrency market.
On May 7, FTX also announced a bankruptcy compensation plan. All creditors can recover their entire principal with varying amounts of interest. It is expected that 98% of creditors will be able to receive 118% of the claim amount, and the rest will be able to guarantee 100% recovery of the principal. The claim amount will be calculated based on the shareholdings of creditors when FTX files for bankruptcy protection in November 2022. In addition, the company will pay customers a total of billions of dollars in interest as compensation for the time value of their investment.
Although creditors are about to receive compensation and Bitcoin prices have hit new highs this year, the bankruptcy of Mt.Gox and FTX has left a permanent shadow on the crypto market. #内容挖矿 Follow me! There are more exciting content!