Gox Watch: Repayments now 39% complete with $5.4B left to go
Mt. Gox has made decent headway with repayments, but they could ramp up from here
Artwork by Crystal Le
Mt. Gox trustees have sent out billions of dollars in bitcoin over the past three weeks, and prices are doing just fine.
Affected users are being credited their long-lost bitcoin to their exchange accounts, 10 years after the platform initially went bust.
So, trustees must send bitcoin to those platforms in batches, the first of which was coincidentally sent right at the pico bottom for bitcoin prices: $54,000.
Almost 54,910 BTC ($3.69 billion) has been forwarded to crypto exchanges on behalf of creditors since July 5.
Read more: Mt. Gox customers to receive crypto assets after 10-year wait
The latest batch of repayments was made in the very early hours Wednesday ET, when 2,361 BTC ($158.25 million) was sent to Bitstamp.
Markets had anticipated the first Mt. Gox repayments for weeks, but exactly when they would begin was unknown.
The first transfer, 1,544.7 BTC to Japanese platform Bitbank, was worth $84.9 million at the time. Bitcoin has however since recovered by 22%, so the same sum would fetch $103.85 million right now.
There was initially 141,490 BTC ($9.5 billion at current prices) to distribute to creditors, and now there’s 86,580.2 BTC ($5.37 billion) remaining in Mt. Gox’s wallets, per Arkham Intelligence data. An additional amount in bitcoin cash is also to be distributed, although it would be worth much less in terms of dollar value.
That means the repayment process is now 39% complete. Last week, it was 36% of the way through.
Payments are expected to wind up completely within the next two and a half months, but it could be that transfers to crypto exchanges accelerate from here on out.
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