After 10 long years, early Bitcoin investors are finally about to get their digital coins back from collapsed exchange Mt. Gox.
Movements by the now-defunct exchange’s trustee earlier this week spooked investors when it sent a test transaction, moving $2.8 billion in BTC into one of its cold wallets, according to data from crypt analytics firm Arkham Intelligence.
But attention turned back to the earlier series of massive transfers to exchanges when top American crypto exchange Kraken informed customers on Wednesday that they could receive their Bitcoin in “7-14 days.”
Kraken is one of five exchanges selected to dish out the virtual coins as part of a repayment process to over 20,000 former customers of the collapsed exchange. Between it and Japanese crypto exchange Bitbank, some 13,000 customers are set to receive BTC, with the remaining customers to get their repayments through the three other exchanges.
That means most of the customers expecting repayment should receive their coins from exchanges by early August.
The Mt. Gox trustees have given the five exchanges varying deadlines to make their payouts to customers. Bitstamp has said it will begin its distributions “as soon as possible” and not take the full 60 days it was allotted.
Arkham Intelligence, which tracks several high-profile digital asset wallets, shows that the Mt. Gox wallet now holds about 90,000 Bitcoin, worth over $6 billion. As large amounts of BTC were moved by Mt. Gox trustees and the German government in recent weeks, the price of Bitcoin faced downward pressure. But as analysts predicted, the top cryptocurrency proved resilient, seeing its highest price in a month.
Mt. Gox was a Japanese Bitcoin exchange that was forced to shut down in 2014 after a massive hack. Once the largest crypto exchange in the world, criminals managed to find a vulnerability and pinch 850,000 Bitcoin—today worth more than $57 billion—from users.
A rehabilitation proposal was approved in 2021 that promised to remunerate about 90% of the assets owed to affected customers. Out-of-pocket investors then had to file claims last year to get their funds back.
But despite the huge amount of Bitcoin stolen, law enforcement managed to get back just 140,000 BTC to repay creditors.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.