Victims of the now defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox are set to get some of their money back in the coming weeks and months. Several creditors have set forth a plan to pay back at least some of the funds that were lost (or stolen) in the company’s collapse, but the news isn’t all good, as some analysts believe this could cause a heavy slump in the bitcoin price.
Mt. Gox Victims Are Set to Get Repaid
Mt. Gox was one of the biggest disasters of the crypto space. Occurring in February of 2014 (approximately nine years ago), the company practically went kaput overnight when more than $400 million in BTC funds vanished from the platform. To this day, the mystery surrounding what has happened is still not entirely understood, nor has it been solved.
Some allege that there was some massive technical error that led to the disappearance of the money, while others say that the man in charge of the firm – Mark Karpeles – pocketed the funds. In any case, there is likely to be some speculation over what occurred for many more years.
Meanwhile, victims of the exchange have been waiting to receive a response from executives. Very few have gotten their money back up to this point in time, though it looks as if that’s about to change. Customers had until March tenth of this year to select a repayment plan, and said payments are expected to be doled out in the beginning in September this year.
At the time of its collapse, Mt. Gox was in charge of more than 70 percent of the world’s overall bitcoin transactions. This goes to show you just how much money was stored away in the platform. It’s estimated that about seven percent of the world’s bitcoin supply up to that point went missing due to the crash of the firm.
UBS strategist Ivan Kachkovski explained in a recent statement that he’s not concerned about the consequences allegedly associated with the Mt. Gox payouts, and he doesn’t think anything negative is going to occur with the BTC price. He said:
It’s certainly difficult to estimate the extent to which the market has been pricing massive sales coming from Mt Gox. However, we think such news could have been an additional factor for, what we believe could be mainly retail-led, BTC’s surprising resilience of late.
It Doesn’t Compare to FTX
Who would have known that roughly eight and a half years later, Mt. Gox would be terribly outdone by another crypto exchange collapse in FTX, which at one time was considered one of the top five digital currency trading platforms in the world.
Not long ago, a report emerged claiming the FTX fall led to more than $200 billion being wiped off the crypto map.
