Mt Gox extended to 2025, 11 years after theft and bankruptcy

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The Japanese bankruptcy trustee overseeing funds from defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has extended its payout deadline by yet another year. Many who’d looked forward to the end of October 2024 to find out if they’d receive a payout now have another year to wait—until October 31, 2025.

This was due to many remaining creditors still not receiving payouts, having missed key submission deadlines, or after encountering other issues in the process. At stake are the remains of Mt. Gox’s 2014 deposit pool of JPY698,246,328 and around 200,000 BTC. Those amounts have diminished over the years since.

The story of Mt. Gox is intertwined with the history of Bitcoin itself. In Bitcoin’s earlier years, and certainly around the time Bitcoin first gained mainstream attention, it was the primary place to trade between BTC and fiat currency.

Despite being based in Tokyo, Japan, Mt. Gox was the only Bitcoin-fiat exchange with serious liquidity and remittance access to U.S. bank accounts. These bank transfers, along with Mt. Gox’s in-house security and record-keeping shortcomings, would later contribute to its undoing.

Bitcoin finally hit the (relative) “big time” in 2013, its unit price first soaring to around US$300 in April before falling below $100 and then rebounding to over $1,000 by the end of that year. There have been claims that Mt. Gox’s own automated trading bots contributed to that bull run.

Suddenly, many early Bitcoin adopters found themselves incredibly wealthy. Much of that BTC had been mined by individual hobbyists or acquired for mere cents each. Mt. Gox experienced problems with its U.S. banking partners, and starting in late 2013, there were rumors that the exchange might be insolvent. This was widely dismissed as “FUD” by BTC fanatics who would dogpile any media claims that something was wrong.

Everyone’s worst fears came true in mid-February 2014 when Mt. Gox abruptly shut down and removed any ability to withdraw funds in either cash or BTC (controversially, they still accepted deposits for another week or so). The exchange and its parent company, Tibanne Ltd., filed for bankruptcy later that month, and BTC’s instant-millionaires found themselves flat broke. In the 10 years since then, they’ve been waiting to find out if they could recover whatever remained of their funds.

It later emerged that unidentified hackers had all but emptied Mt. Gox’s BTC wallets in the months leading up to the closure. The mystery of who pulled off the heist and where the stolen BTC ultimately went is Bitcoin’s second-most notorious—behind the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto‘s true identity.

Digital asset exchange hacks and multi-billion-dollar fund losses have since become a regular occurrence in the crypto trading universe. Many have involved losses far larger than Mt Gox’s due to the size of the market and the multitude of blockchain assets. Unfortunately for Mt. Gox’s customers, their losses occurred prior to the era of privately funded bailouts, leaving them at the mercy of court-appointed bankruptcy trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi.

Mt Gox creditors’ long wait just got even longer

The initial deadline for filing proof of rehabilitation claims was October 22, 2018, four and a half years after Mt. Gox locked its accounts (and its physical office in Tokyo). It seemed like a long time back then, but it’s now been another six years since that deadline passed.

Creditors faced several choices to receive their share of the lost funds: (a) Take a lump-sum calculated from the amount remaining in the Trustee’s pool; or (b) wait until the end of the payment period in the hope of receiving an additional share of any unclaimed funds. They could also select payment in fiat cash (JPY) or BTC (plus the equivalent in BCH, thanks to the 2017 hard fork in the Bitcoin network). However, those who missed the email (and/or the deadline) requesting BTC/BCH payment addresses were shut out of that process and could receive only JPY after all other payouts were made.

The deadline to provide bank/remittance information for the cash receivers was October 11, 2024. That date itself was an extension of the previous deadline, which was March, then October 2023. Many BTC/BCH-selectors have reportedly received payouts, but those left with the cash option (whether voluntarily or not) had hoped the October 2024 date would finally bring closure to the saga.

Knowing exactly what information was required and by what date has been a Sisyphean task for creditors over the past decade. It usually involved long pages of ambiguous wall text and the need to constantly monitor email inboxes in case some important piece of new information arrived. Communication from the Trustee by physical mail has been sporadic to nonexistent, and even by email, there could be months (or years) of long gaps between updates. Anecdotally, many creditors had given up hope of ever receiving a payout or wondered if there would be any funds left at all after 10 years of Trustee fees and other competing legal claims.

Now, it seems, they’ll have another year to enjoy that uncertainty—provided the new deadline doesn’t get extended again.

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