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Mt. Gox begins compensating victims

In February 2014, 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared from the Mt. Gox exchange.

By Mike Hesp
• 7 min read
Mt. Gox begins compensating victims

In February 2014, 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared from the Mt.Gox exchange. After eight years they now want to compensate harmed investors.

After eight years of waiting, the drama around the Mt.Gox hack is slowly coming to an end. The bankrupt Bitcoin exchange will repay at least a portion of its deposits to affected parties. This is shown in a new document from the Japanese insolvency administrator Nobuaki Kobayashi. Specifically, the document says:

''The rehabilitation trustee is currently preparing the repayments in accordance with the approved rehabilitation plan.''

A concrete date for the start of payments is still not available. During the process, the trustee has set up a website where affected investors can sign up to be eligible for repayments later. Moreover, injured parties can decide whether and in what form the compensation should take. There are three options to choose from: Cash, Bitcoin and/or Bitcoin Cash.

The restructuring plan has been in effect since last November, after the project was approved by a Japanese court. At that time, it was still unclear whether investors could also hope for repayment in Bitcoin. Those concerns are now laid to rest, but according to media reports only 150,000 BTC of the originally stolen 850,000 BTC are available for payouts.

Crypto experts fear a Bitcoin sell-off

Yet crypto experts fear a BTC sell-off. The hack on the former Bitcoin exchange happened eight years ago. For many investors, the price has since at least twentyfolded. Affected parties could now decide to put their holdings on the market to capitalize on the performance of the past years, it is feared. BTC-ECHO market expert Stefan Lübeck says:

''After years of waiting for the release of customer funds, former Mt.Gox users may increasingly consider selling their bitcoin holdings. At the time of the February 2014 hack, the price of a Bitcoin was about $600. Consequently, the affected users could now sell at roughly thirty times that price.''

Ki Young Ju, CEO of data-analytics service CryptoQuant, offers a tool that lets traders set price alerts as soon as Mt.Gox payments begin. "So far it’s quiet," the CEO wrote on Twitter.

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