Inactive bitcoin trading platform On Monday, Mt. Gox announced that, after repeatedly extending deadlines, it will begin distributing assets that were taken from customers in a 2014 attack the first week of July. Nobuaki Kobayashi, a trustee, stated in a statement released on the Mt. Gox website on Monday that “the Rehabilitation Trustee has been preparing to make repayments in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash under the Rehabilitation Plan.” According to Kobayashi, “the repayments will be made from the beginning of July 2024,” but not before completing specific safety precautions and doing due diligence.
Since early investors would receive assets at a significantly higher value than their entry before to 2013, the repayments are primarily expected to increase selling pressure on the bitcoin (BTC) markets, dealers said. This will likely lead to investors dumping at least some of their holdings. In the early days of bitcoin, Mt. Gox handled more than 70% of all transactions, making it the leading cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
Hackers breached the exchange in early 2014, causing an estimated loss of 740,000 bitcoin (worth $15 billion at today’s values). Out of all the attacks on the exchange in the years 2010–2013, the hack was the largest.
Trustees have been working on a repayment plan for a number of years; last year, a Tokyo court gave them until October 2024 to complete it. The exchange made the first on-chain wallet movements in five years in May when it transferred over 140,000 BTC, or around $9 billion, from cold wallets to an unidentified address in 13 transactions.
According to CoinGecko data, the price of bitcoin fell from above $62,300 in the early hours of Asia to under $62,100 in the minutes that followed the release of Mt. Gox’s statement.