Mt. Gox moves nearly $10 billion worth of bitcoins

Mt. Gox transferred nearly $10 billion worth of Bitcoins (BTC) to a new wallet on May 28. The company wants to compensate its creditors after filing for bankruptcy 10 years ago, in April 2014. The cryptocurrency market is expecting a wave of selling and large capital inflows in the coming days.

Notably, Mt. Gox activity began at 01:42 UTC, as reported by the Whale alarm Account (@whale_alert) to X. The first transaction sent 3,999 BTC from three known Mt. Gox addresses to a new Bitcoin wallet: “1JbezDVd9VsK9o1Ga9UqLydeuEvhKLAPs6”.

As it turns out, the first transaction was followed by six more with larger amounts and from dozens of Mt. Gox-tagged addresses. In total, the new wallet received 141,658 BTC worth $9.65 billion and has already started redistributing it.

Mt. Gox Payments

At the time of writing, the recently opened account related to Mt. Gox has started making small payments, as seen on-chain, with three transactions worth $169.06, $1.5 million, and $273.18 million having been made so far.

In September 2023, Mt Gox’s trustee announced October 31, 2024 as the new payment deadline for creditors, so it is likely that these first three transactions are part of those repayments or are intended to cover other expenses.

Bitcoin (BTC) price analysis as Mt. Gox moves its funds

Interestingly, Finbold obtained data from Santiment, On-chain activity overlaps with Bitcoin price. BTC recovered from psychological resistance at $70,500 a few hours before the first Mt. Gox transaction.

It is possible that the correction could have been made by insider trading in anticipation of the following activity.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $68,000, recovering slightly from lows of $67,500. In addition, the new Mt. Gox wallet contains 141,680 BTC worth $9.648 billion.

Essentially, this represents a third of Bitcoin’s 24-hour trading volume of $30.77 billion, underscoring its importance to the leading cryptocurrency. A sell-off would likely cause a huge price drop that speculators are already trying to price in.

What happened to Mt. Gox in 2014?

Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange, was founded in 2010 by Jed McCaleb and Mark Karpelès. Jed McCaleb is the co-founder and former CTO of Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM).

Mt. Gox quickly became the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, handling over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions. In addition, it was one of the first cryptocurrency exchanges to gain some relevance in the early days.

However, in February 2014, Mt. Gox ceased trading and filed for bankruptcy protection. The company announced that it had lost approximately 850,000 bitcoins (worth $450 million at the time) due to hacking and theft. The incident rocked the cryptocurrency world and raised concerns about the security of digital assets.

The Mt. Gox case had a significant impact on the perception and regulation of cryptocurrencies. Mark Karpelès, the CEO of Mt. Gox, was later arrested and charged with embezzlement and data manipulation.

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