Bankrupt crypto exchange Mt. Gox made several high-value transfers from the exchange’s cold wallet for the first time in five years.
Blockchain data shows that a cold wallet tied to Mt. Gox transferred a total of 141,664 BTC worth around $9.6 billion to a new wallet address late on Monday. The price of bitcoin dropped 1.3% shortly after the transfers were noticed, but had stabilised to around $67,800 at the time of writing.
Japan-based Mt. Gox was one of the largest exchanges during the early days of crypto, but suffered six hacks between 2011 and 2014 — the last of which pushed the exchange into filing for bankruptcy.
The process to repay creditors has been slow, with the deadline for repayments being pushed several times over the years. The latest deadline, which set in place last year, is October 31, 2024.
Some market participants now believe that the estate handling the bankruptcy process could finally be gearing up to make distributions to creditors.
“Congrats to the creditors, must be a relief and a half to get these coins back. What a saga,” commented Glassnode analyst Checkmate on X.
Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital, estimates that of the $9.6 billion that Mt. Gox has recovered, each individual creditor will be paid out an average of $205,413.
He speculated that the moves into the unknown wallet were “a consolidation before moving to the creditor custodians” such as BitGo, Kraken, and Bitstamp.
