Creditors from Mt. Gox were told by Nobuaki Kobayashi, the Rehabilitation Trustee for the now-bankrupt exchange, to register and select a repayment method under the rehabilitation plan first announced in October 2022. The deadline for filing claims has already been extended by two months in January.
In a March 7 announcement, Kobayashi said that former Mt. Gox customers will have the option to receive their compensation as a lump-sum payment, bank remittance, cryptocurrency transaction, or remittance through a money transfer service. Experts estimated that the defunct exchange held up to 900,000 BTC in its accounts at the peak of its popularity before it was shut down in 2014 after losing nearly all customers’ deposits to a massive hack.
The losses suffered by the exchange amounted to $480 million at the time, but now are worth nearly $19 billion, with the total number of approved creditors’ claims reaching $17.6 billion, according to Decrypt.
As a ten-year-long liquidation process is coming to an end, many speculated that the release of the lost funds can destabilize the Bitcoin price. However, this is an unlikely scenario, as much less BTC will enter the market than expected, a report from UBS claims.
“The early lump-sum option with fiat repayments suggests that the exchange would have to sell BTC to raise the requisite cash,” the analysts, quoted by CoinDesk, said, noting the “long-held fear that Mt. Gox redemptions would hurt bitcoin’s price.”
According to the report, most Mt. Gox early adopters are likely still crypto believers and will opt to “hodling” Bitcoin, which is posed to avert market shock.
