$140 Million Worth BTC Have Been Moved from Mt Gox Wallets
On Thursday, the defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has reportedly moved nearly 16,000 BTC as the estate’s trustee prepares to liquidate some more number of BTC tokens. At time exchange on April 26 the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are worth $140 million.
According to the Bitcoin blockchain data, the coins came from multiple addresses were being consolidated into a single wallet with almost 0 BTC remaining in the source addresses.
Tokyo-based lawyer, Nobuaki Kobayashi, who controls the wallet of the exchange’s bankruptcy trustee had admitted last month that he had sold $400 million worth of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in September 2017 in order to compensate the creditors of the bankrupt and defunct exchange. Now, the current blockchain data shows that Mt. Gox still holds over 1,46,000 BTC tokens.
Additional information shows that in addition to BTC, a similar number (16,000) of Bitcoin Cash tokens are also on the move These coins were worth nearly $21 million at the current exchange rate.
Mt. Gox is one of the oldest Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange found back in 2010. This crypto exchange was so popular that it alone would handle 80 percent of the global trading volumes at one time. However, in February 2014, hackers stole around 850,000 BTC (worth $460 million then) which led to the closure of its operations entirely.
Post this, founder of Mt. Gox, Mark Karpeles has been involved in a lot of legal battles including embezzlement charges and class-action lawsuits. A criminal investigation and attempts to repay the creditors are still underway.
Kobayashi has been asked to liquidate the BTC tokens on behalf of the Mt. Gox creditors, most of whom could not recover their funds as the exchange went defunct. Kobayashi has been selling the BTC and BCH tokens periodically to recover the funds, however, he has been criticized for selling BTC tokens on order-book cryptocurrency exchange instead of over-the-counter (OTC) channels by institutional investors. Trading through OTC channels prevents wild fluctuations in the global markets.
Many speculate that the sharp decline in the price of BTC could have possibly due to Kobayashi selling the BTC tokens to an OTC buyer below the market-rate. Although the coin would have been delivered to the purchaser on Thursday, he/she would have already sold their holdings on Wednesday in their possession at the market rate, driving the price lower but at the same time profiting from the arbitrage.
On the other hand, Mt. Gox creditors have been asking to move the company out of bankruptcy and into civil rehabilitation that allows them to compensate their holdings at the current rate of Bitcoin. At the moment, the creditors are receiving a standard compensation of $480 per BTC token, which was the price when Mt. Gox had gone bankrupt.