Bitcoin
Mt. Gox Refunds Are Coming: When Can Users Expect Their Bitcoins?
After 10 long years, early Bitcoin Investors are finally about to get their digital coins back from failed exchange Mt. Gox.
The now-defunct exchange’s administrator’s moves earlier this week spooked investors when he sent a test transactionmoving $2.8 billion in BTC in one of your cold walletsaccording to data from cryptocurrency analytics firm Arkham Intelligence.
But attention has turned to the previous series of massive transfers to exchanges when major American cryptocurrency exchange Kraken informed customers on Wednesday that they could receive their Bitcoins in “7 to 14 days.”
Kraken is one of five exchanges selected to distribute the virtual coins as part of a refund process for more than 20,000 former customers of the failed exchange. Between Kraken and Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Bitbank, around 13,000 customers are expected to receive BTC, with the remaining customers receiving their refunds through the other three exchanges.
This means that most customers expecting payment should receive their coins from exchanges in early August.
Mt. Gox trustees have given the five exchanges varying deadlines to make their payments to customers. Bitstamp said it will begin its distributions “as soon as possible” and not taking the full 60 days was assigned.
Arkham Intelligence, which tracks several high-profile digital asset portfolios, show that the Mt. Gox wallet now holds around 90,000 Bitcoin, worth over $6 billion. As large amounts of BTC have been moved by Mt. Gox curators and the German government in recent weeks, the price of Bitcoin has faced downward pressure. But as analysts predictedthe main cryptocurrency has proven resilient, seeing its highest price in a month.
Mt. Gox was a Japanese Bitcoin exchange that was forced to close in 2014 after a massive hack. Once the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, criminals managed to find a vulnerability and steal 850,000 Bitcoins — now worth over $57 billion — from users.
A rehabilitation proposal was approved in 2021 that promised to remunerate around 90% of the assets owed to affected customers. Direct investors then had to file claims last year to get their funds back.
But despite the huge amount of Bitcoin stolen, police were only able to recover 140,000 BTC to pay off creditors.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.