Gox Watch: $3B in bitcoin repayments down, $5.8B left to go

Mt. Gox has for years made for a great bogeyman. Now, crypto is about one-third of the way to slaying it once and for all.

The final phase of the Mt. Gox repayment plan is about 36% complete — 10 years after it filed for bankruptcy. Kraken confirmed to Blockworks that repayments to its customers would be credited to relevant user accounts over two weeks. 

As of Friday morning, there are only two transfers in the trustee’s blockchain history that are part of repayments, per Arkham Intelligence data: 

• 1,545 BTC to Japanese exchange Bitbank on July 5, worth $84.9 million then and $98.9 million now.
• 48,641 BTC to an address believed to be Kraken’s on Tuesday (July 16) — $3.07 billion then, $3.11 billion now.

Bitcoin fell a few percent after the transfer to Bitbank but has since recovered, and then some. BTC is currently up 15% from those lows, jumping from under $55,900 to over $64,000.

There’s 90,344 BTC ($5.77 billion) still sitting in Mt. Gox’s bitcoin wallets, waiting to be sent out over the next couple of months (there’s additional bitcoin cash to be repaid, resulting from the 2018 hard fork, but it’s currently unknown from which addresses). 

Read more: Bitcoin bulls meet their third final boss after US and Germany: Mt. Gox

Mt. Gox trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi in a recent letter wrote that the transactions to Bitbank and Kraken meant over 13,000 creditors had been repaid to date. There were 20,658 individual creditors with claims to bitcoin in total, so Mt. Gox is 65% of the way through repayments, going by straight headcount.

The median Mt. Gox claim was previously calculated at a little over four BTC, which at $500 per coin would’ve been only $2,000 when the exchange went bust. Now, it’s over $250,000.

We’ll sadly never know for sure exactly how many Mt. Gox creditors dump their bitcoin shortly after receiving it. Creditors are being paid directly to their crypto exchange accounts. That means the bitcoin will first go to a hot wallet, which jumbles it all together with the rest of user funds — practically impossible to track beyond that. 

Still, Mt. Gox repayments will be one button away from trading it for some other cryptocurrency, or, even boomer fiat. Tempting. The government of German state Saxony otherwise sold most of its $2.8 billion bitcoin stash over-the-counter, rather than directly on exchanges, to avoid price impact.

Creditor claims skew heavily toward the top, with the bottom half only set to receive 1.3% of the total, per a 2022 report from Blockchain Research Lab. The top 1% of creditors meanwhile have claim to more than half of it, and 23 alone had more than a quarter.

Blockstream co-founders Gregory Maxwell and Adam Back are reportedly those among Mt. Gox creditors, as well as Roger Ver. There’s also Fortress Investment Group, to which some Mt. Gox creditors had sold their claims for an earlier payout in cash.

The real question is whether the worst of Mt. Gox’s market impact is still left to come. 

Going by Kobayashi’s numbers, the remaining 35% of creditors will receive 64% of the remaining bitcoin, worth close to $6 billion. The bigger fish are next on the repayment list.

A twist on an old adage goes: The bigger the fish, the harder the hands. Let’s see if that rings true.

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