Bitcoin Gets a Boost as Mt. Gox Postpones Repayments

Mt. Gox, once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange until it shut down in 2014 following a series of hacks, has started paying back the billions of dollars in BTC owned to customers. But its deadline for finishing that process has now been delayed, and the price of Bitcoin has been climbing since.

Bitcoin is now back above $62,200, rising nearly 3% over the past 24 hours after dipping under $59,000 on Thursday. Traders may be responding to the notion that a delay in Mt. Gox repayments could mean less sell pressure on the markets, as billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin may not be flowing to users who would potentially dump it and cash out.

The Mt. Gox rehabilitation team shared in a notice posted Thursday that the deadline for repayments has been extended for a full year, from October 31 this year to the same date in 2025—with permission from the court, due to various issues that have come up during the process.

The note to creditors said that “many rehabilitation creditors still have not received their repayments because they have not completed the necessary procedures for receiving repayments.”

“Additionally, a considerable number of rehabilitation creditors have not received their repayments due to various reasons, such as issues arising during the repayments process,” it added, without noting what the “issues” were. 

Investors may interpret the new repayment schedule as bullish because it means those Mt. Gox users set to recover big stashes won’t be selling—at least not yet. 

When the coins were first being distributed, the price of Bitcoin dropped because traders were expecting Mt. Gox creditors to cash in their BTC.  

Crypto exchanges Kraken, Bitstamp, Bitbank, SBI VC Trade, and BitGo are in charge of distributing the coins to former Mt. Gox clients. Back in July, Bitstamp and Kraken announced they had started to distribute the digital assets, but exactly how much crypto was repaid remains unclear as of now.

Customers who lost money in the Mt. Gox hacks would have made huge returns, as the price of Bitcoin was less than $500 back in 2014. 

The exchanges are also distributing other cryptocurrencies lost in the hack, including Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum. 

Mt. Gox was a Japanese crypto exchange used by the earliest Bitcoin investors. It was forced to shut a decade ago following a number of hacks: Criminals found a vulnerability in the exchange’s security and ran away with a total of 850,000 Bitcoins—today worth more than $52.8 billion.

A rehabilitation proposal was approved in 2021 that promised to remunerate about 90% of the assets owed to affected customers. Out-of-pocket investors then had to file claims last year to get their funds back.

Law enforcement managed to claw back just 140,000 Bitcoins to repay creditors.

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication with additional details.

Edited by Andrew Hayward