Creditors of Mt. Gox Allegedly Begin Receiving Payments 10 Years After Crypto Exchange Shutdown

Creditors of the defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox have allegedly begun receiving payments for their claims ten years after the platform collapsed due to insolvency.

According to several posts and comments on Reddit, creditors who chose PayPal as their preferred payment method have started receiving payments for their bitcoin and bitcoin cash balances in Japanese yen.

Creditors of Mt. Gox Receiving Payments

One user in the Mt. Gox insolvency subreddit, named Mat Phillips, revealed that he received 30,283 yen ($212) to his PayPal account for a claim of 0.125 in BTC and BCH. According to the claim form, Phillips is supposed to receive a total of 106,502 yen ($747), so he posted a question on Reddit asking whether there would be additional payments.

Community members reassured Phillips and other users who raised similar inquiries that there would be more payments and that all claims would be resolved over time.

On the other hand, some users were paid twice and wondered whether the Mt. Gox trustee would take steps to resolve the duplicate payments.

Payments Will Conclude by October 2024

The Mt. Gox payout came as a Christmas surprise for creditors who had lost hope of recovering their claims after so many years. The Mt. Gox trustee has extended the repayment deadline to creditors several times, with the latest date being October 31, 2024. Community members suggested that users who registered on time without errors should be paid by the end of 2023, but there was no guarantee.

Mt. Gox ran into troubled waters in 2011 after being hacked for 25,000 bitcoins. The exchange, which at the time handled about 70 percent of bitcoin transactions, lost an additional 750,000 bitcoins in another hack in 2014. These events led to the platform’s collapse, affecting around 24,000 creditors, and four years later, it initiated a civil rehabilitation process for its users to compensate for their losses.

Despite the hacking, the defunct company still holds 142,000 bitcoins, 143,000 bitcoin cash, and 69 billion yen.