Type | Bitcoin exchange |
---|---|
Location | Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan |
Founded | 2006 |
Closed | 2014 |
Owner | Tibanne Ltd. (owned by Mark Karpelès) |
Currency | Bitcoin |
Website | www |
Mt. Gox was a Bitcoin exchange based in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. [1] Launched in 2006 as a tradable card game service, Mt. Gox transitioned into a Bitcoin exchange by 2010 and handled over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions globally by early 2014. [2] [3]
In February 2014, Mt. Gox suspended trading, closed its website and exchange service, and filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors. [4] [5] [6] By April 2014, the company had entered liquidation proceedings. [7] [8] The company reported that approximately 850,000 bitcoins were missing, though 200,000 bitcoins were subsequently recovered. [9] [10] In April 2015, Tokyo security company WizSec presented evidence indicating that most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen directly from Mt. Gox's hot cryptocurrency wallet over time, beginning in late 2011. [11] [12] [13]
In 2017, Alexander Vinnik, the Russian operator of the Bitcoin exchange BTC-e, was arrested in Greece and indicted for laundering over $4 billion, including funds stolen from the hack of Mt. Gox. [14] US authorities accused Vinnik of using BTC-e to launder money for individuals involved in crimes such as computer hacking and drug trafficking. [15] They also linked him to the collapse of Mt. Gox, alleging that he laundered the stolen funds through BTC-e and Tradehill, another exchange he owned. [16] Vinnik's arrest was part of a series of US operations against Russian cybercriminals in Europe. [17] In May 2024, Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering. [18]
In June 2023, the United States Department of Justice charged two Russian nationals, Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, with conspiring to launder approximately 647,000 bitcoins stolen in the 2014 hack of Mt. Gox. [19] The stolen bitcoins were valued at roughly half a billion dollars at the time. [20]
In late 2006, programmer Jed McCaleb thought of building a website for users of the Magic: The Gathering Online tradable card game service, to let them trade "Magic: The Gathering Online" cards like stocks. [21] [22] [9] In January 2007, he purchased the domain name "Mt.gox" , short for "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange". [23] [24] [25] [26] Initially in beta release, [27] sometime around late 2007, the service went live for approximately three months before McCaleb moved on to other projects, having decided it was not worth his time. In 2009, he reused the domain name to advertise his card game The Far Wilds. [28]
In July 2010, McCaleb read about bitcoin on Slashdot, [29] and decided that the bitcoin community needed an exchange for trading bitcoin and regular currencies. On 18 July, Mt. Gox launched its exchange and price quoting service deploying it on the spare "Mt.Gox" domain name. [22] [30]
In 2009, Mark Karpelès founded Tibanne Co. Ltd., a Japan-based bitcoin related technology provider, where he served as CEO. [31] In March 2011, Jed McCaleb sold 88% of Mt. Gox to Tibanne Co. Ltd, controlled by Karpelès, a French developer who was then residing in France. [32] Karpelès subsequently moved the company's headquarters to Tokyo, Japan, where he began expanding its operations. [33]
On 13 June 2011, Mt. Gox reported that approximately 25,000 bitcoins (valued at around $400,000 at the time) had been stolen from 478 accounts. On 17 June, Mt. Gox's user database was leaked and posted for sale on Pastebin, signed by a user named "cRazIeStinGeR" and tied to the email address "auto36299386@hushmail.com". [34] Reports indicated that the theft of bitcoins from Mt. Gox accounts continued throughout that day. [35] On 19 June, fraudulent trades caused the price of bitcoin to drop to one cent on the Mt. Gox exchange. A hacker allegedly used credentials from a compromised computer belonging to a Mt. Gox auditor to transfer a large number of bitcoins to himself and then used the exchange's software to sell them, creating a massive "ask" order at any price. The price corrected itself within minutes to its proper value. [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] Accounts holding the equivalent of more than $8.75 million were affected. [38] To demonstrate control over the remaining coins, Mt. Gox announced and executed the move of 424,242 bitcoins from cold storage to a Mt. Gox address in Block 132749. [42]
In October 2011, approximately two dozen transactions appeared in the blockchain (Block 150951) that sent a total of 2,609 bitcoins to invalid addresses. [43] Since no private key could ever be assigned to these addresses, the bitcoins were effectively lost. While the standard client would normally check for such errors and reject the transactions, the nodes on the network did not, revealing a vulnerability in the protocol.[ citation needed ]
On 22 February 2013, following the introduction of new anti-money laundering requirements by e-commerce/online payment system company Dwolla, some Dwolla accounts became temporarily restricted. As a result, transactions from Mt. Gox to those accounts were cancelled by Dwolla. The funds never made it back to Mt. Gox accounts. The Mt. Gox help desk issued the following comment: "Please be advised that you are actually not allowed to cancel any withdrawals received from Mt. Gox as we have never had this case before and we are working with Dwolla to locate your returned funds." The funds were finally returned on 3 May, nearly three months later, with a note: "Please be advised never to cancel any Dwolla withdrawals from us again".[ citation needed ]
In March 2013, the bitcoin transaction log or "blockchain" temporarily forked into two independent logs, with differing rules on how transactions could be accepted. The Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange briefly halted bitcoin deposits. Bitcoin prices briefly dipped by 23%, to $37, as the event occurred, [44] [45] before recovering to their previous level (approximately $48) in the following hours. [46]
By April 2013 and into 2014, Mt. Gox had grown to the point where it was handling over 70% of the world's bitcoin trades, as the largest bitcoin intermediary and the world's leading bitcoin exchange. [13] [9] [47] [8] With prices increasing rapidly, Mt. Gox suspended trading from 11 to 12 April for a "market cooldown". [48] The value of a single bitcoin fell to a low of $55.59 after the resumption of trading, before stabilizing above $100. Around mid-May 2013, Mt. Gox traded 150,000 bitcoins per day, per Bitcoin Charts. [49]
On 2 May 2013 CoinLab filed a $75 million lawsuit against Mt. Gox, alleging a breach of contract. [50] The companies had formed a partnership in February 2013 under which CoinLab was to handle all of Mt. Gox's North American services. [50] CoinLab's lawsuit contended that Mt. Gox failed to allow it to move existing U.S. and Canadian customers from Mt. Gox to CoinLab. [50]
On 15 May 2013 the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a warrant to seize money from Mt. Gox's U.S. subsidiary's account with payment processor Dwolla. [51] The warrant suggested the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an investigative branch of the DHS, asserted that the subsidiary, which was not licensed by the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), was operating as an unregistered money transmitter in the US. [51] Between May and July the DHS seized more than $5 million from the subsidiary. [49] [9] On 29 June 2013, Mt. Gox received its money services business (MSB) license from FinCEN. [52] [53]
Mt. Gox suspended US dollar withdrawals on 20 June 2013. [54] The Mizuho Bank branch in Tokyo, handling Mt. Gox transactions, subsequently pressured the exchange to close its account. Although Mt. Gox announced the resumption of withdrawals on 4 July 2013, few US dollar withdrawals had been successfully completed by 5 September 2013. [55] [56] [57]
On 5 August 2013, Mt. Gox announced that it incurred "significant losses" due to crediting deposits which had not fully cleared, and that new deposits would no longer be credited until the funds transfer was fully completed. [58]
Wired Magazine reported in November 2013 that customers were experiencing delays of weeks to months in withdrawing cash from their accounts. [47] [8] The article said that the company had "effectively been frozen out of the U.S. banking system because of its regulatory problems".
On 7 February 2014, Mt. Gox halted all bitcoin withdrawals. [59] The company said it was pausing withdrawal requests "to obtain a clear technical view of the currency processes". [59] The company issued a press release on 10 February 2014, stating that the issue was due to transaction malleability: "A bug in the bitcoin software makes it possible for someone to use the bitcoin network to alter transaction details to make it seem like a sending of bitcoins to a bitcoin wallet did not occur when in fact it did occur. Since the transaction appears as if it has not proceeded correctly, the bitcoins may be resent. Mt Gox is working with the bitcoin core development team and others to mitigate this issue." [60] [61]
On 17 February 2014, with all Mt. Gox withdrawals still halted and competing exchanges back in full operation, the company published another press release indicating the steps it claimed it was taking to address security issues. [62] In an email interview with the Wall Street Journal , CEO Mark Karpelès refused to comment on increasing concerns among customers about the financial status of the exchange, did not give a definite date on which withdrawals would be resumed, and wrote that the exchange would impose "new daily and monthly limits" on withdrawals if and when they were resumed. [63]
On 23 February 2014, Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès resigned from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation. [64] The same day, all posts on the company's Twitter account were removed. [65]
On 24 February 2014, Mt. Gox suspended all trading, and hours later its website went offline, returning a blank page. [66] [67] [68] A leaked alleged internal crisis management document claimed that the company was insolvent, after having lost 744,408 bitcoins in a theft which went undetected for years. [66] [67] [69] [70]
Six other major bitcoin exchanges released a joint statement distancing themselves from Mt. Gox, shortly before Mt. Gox's website went offline. [71] [72]
On 25 February 2014, Mt. Gox reported on its website that a "decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being", citing "recent news reports and the potential repercussions on Mt Gox's operations". Chief executive Mark Karpelès told Reuters that Mt. Gox was "at a turning point". [73] [74] [75]
From 1 February 2014 until the end of March, during the period of Mt. Gox problems, the value of bitcoin declined by 36%. [76]
Mt. Gox's bankruptcy proceedings initially planned to repay creditors in Japanese yen at a price of approximately 483 US dollars per bitcoin, resulting in a total repayment of 45.6 billion Japanese yen (around 400 million US dollars). [77] At the market price at the beginning of 2022 (around $35,000 per bitcoin), this would have left Karpelès with a significant amount of wealth. [78] However, Karpelès, the former CEO of Mt. Gox, stated that he did not want the profits he was set to receive from the bankruptcy proceedings. [79] [80] Under Japanese bankruptcy laws, around $1 billion of the money received would go to the company’s shareholders, with the largest being Karpelès’ company Tibanne, which owned 88% of Mt. Gox. [81] [82]
In June 2018, the Tokyo District Court approved the petition by creditors to begin civil rehabilitation proceedings. This allowed for more flexible repayment terms, including compensation based on the current value of the lost coins. Creditors were able to start filing new claims under these proceedings on August 23, 2018. However, by June 2021, a U.S. Federal lawsuit by Mt. Gox customers was unable to proceed as a class-action lawsuit, which placed hopes of compensation in jeopardy. [83]
On July 5, 2024, Mt. Gox began repaying its creditors in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash under the legal rehabilitation plan. [84] Attorney Nobuaki Kobayashi oversees the process, ensuring that all creditor verifications and agreements are in place before disbursements. The repayments mark a significant moment as creditors have been waiting for nearly a decade since the exchange’s collapse in 2014. [85] [86]
Of the 850,000 lost bitcoins, 200,000 bitcoins were recovered, of which 60,000 were later sold by the trustee to secure funds. [87] Given the dramatic increase in Bitcoin's value, the repayment process is substantial. [88] In early July 2024, Mt. Gox moved 47,228 BTC, valued at approximately $2.7 billion, out of its offline wallets as part of the repayment process. [89] Entities like MtGoxBalanceBot have been transparently tracking these movements, providing updates to the community. [90] [91]
On July 22, 2024, the estate transferred $2.85 billion worth of Bitcoin to new wallets, with $340 million of that sum being sent to addresses owned by Bitstamp. [92] [93] Shortly thereafter, an additional 37,477 BTC, worth $2.5 billion, was transferred to an unknown wallet. [94]
As of late July 2024, approximately 40% of the Bitcoin owed to Mt. Gox creditors had been distributed, leaving about 60% still to be returned. [95] This ongoing process involves significant movements in the cryptocurrency market, with the total amount owed to creditors estimated to be around $10 billion. [96]
The commencement of repayments led to significant movements in the cryptocurrency market. [97] The total sum owed to creditors accounts for roughly 0.7% of the total Bitcoin in circulation. [98] The 850,000 lost bitcoins were worth approximately $450 million at the time of the hack, and the 140,000 bitcoins recovered are worth around $10 billion at a price of $70,000 per bitcoin by end of July 2024. [99] This means that creditors are receiving about 16 times more value in today's market. [100]
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