Gox Watch: Repayments now 39% complete with $5.4B left to go

Mt. Gox has made decent headway with repayments, but they could ramp up from here

July 26, 2024 12:28 pm

Artwork by Crystal Le

Mt. Gox trustees have sent out billions of dollars in bitcoin over the past three weeks, and prices are doing just fine.

Affected users are being credited their long-lost bitcoin to their exchange accounts, 10 years after the platform initially went bust.

So, trustees must send bitcoin to those platforms in batches, the first of which was coincidentally sent right at the pico bottom for bitcoin prices: $54,000.

Almost 54,910 BTC ($3.69 billion) has been forwarded to crypto exchanges on behalf of creditors since July 5.

The latest batch of repayments was made in the very early hours Wednesday ET, when 2,361 BTC ($158.25 million) was sent to Bitstamp.

The bigger and darker the bubbles, the bigger the transfer to participating crypto exchanges

Markets had anticipated the first Mt. Gox repayments for weeks, but exactly when they would begin was unknown.

The first transfer, 1,544.7 BTC to Japanese platform Bitbank, was worth $84.9 million at the time. Bitcoin has however since recovered by 22%, so the same sum would fetch $103.85 million right now.

There was initially 141,490 BTC ($9.5 billion at current prices) to distribute to creditors, and now there’s 86,580.2 BTC ($5.37 billion) remaining in Mt. Gox’s wallets, per Arkham Intelligence data. An additional amount in bitcoin cash is also to be distributed, although it would be worth much less in terms of dollar value.

The government of German state Saxony has already dumped all of its bitcoin, which was a far smaller stash than Mt. Gox

That means the repayment process is now 39% complete. Last week, it was 36% of the way through.

Payments are expected to wind up completely within the next two and a half months, but it could be that transfers to crypto exchanges accelerate from here on out.

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