The cryptocurrency exchange, Mt. Gox, which lost 850,000 Bitcoin in investor funds in 2024, is now preparing to repay its defunct users. Starting in July 2024, Mt. Gox’s rehabilitation trustee will begin processing repayments in Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), as stated in a written note issued by the exchange on June 24.
The trustee has once again urged users to be patient, explaining that the order of payments will be based on the specific cryptocurrency exchange. There is more than $9.4 billion worth of Bitcoin owed to around 127,000 creditors of Mt. Gox, who have been waiting for over a decade to retrieve their funds following the exchange’s collapse in 2014 due to multiple undetected hacks.
Mt. Gox’s repayment plans have been closely watched by the industry, with users eagerly anticipating reimbursement for their lost BTC for more than 10 years. In a significant move on May 28, Mt. Gox transferred 141,686 BTC valued at $9.62 billion to a new wallet named “1Jbez” from various other cold wallets linked to Mt. Gox. This marked the first movement of funds from the collapsed exchange in over five years.
Shortly after this development, Mt. Gox rehabilitation trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi confirmed that the consolidation was part of the exchange’s strategy to begin repaying creditors, although no specific timeline was provided for when the repayments would commence. Mt. Gox, once a major player in the cryptocurrency exchange world, went offline in 2014 after experiencing a security breach that resulted in the loss of over 850,000 BTC in user funds, valued at over $51.9 billion.
Despite the trustee’s announcement regarding repayments, there may be further delays beyond the current deadline set in September 2023, which was established a month before the initial repayment date of October 31, 2023.