Mt.Gox, the defunct crypto exchange, recently saw a whopping $2.19 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) being transferred to unmarked crypto wallets. The transfer of 32,371 BTC tokens to unknown wallet addresses happened on Monday evening, one day prior to the US election.
Blockchain analytics firm Arkham reported this transaction on the defunct crypto exchange which included a 30,371 BTC movement to the “1FG2C…Rveoy” wallet address. This is the biggest movement Mt. Gox has experienced in recent months.
The rest of the 2000 Bitcoins were transferred to a Mt. Gox cold wallet called “1Jbez…LAPs6.” However, these BTC tokens were later sent to another unidentified wallet address called “15gNR…a8Aok.”
Last week the defunct crypto exchange experienced a 500 BTC transfer to unmarked wallets which was the start of the pattern of these token movements.
Although the reason behind these Bitcoin movements isn't known, crypto experts are speculating that maybe these are preparations for future repayments to creditors who were affected by the bankruptcy of Mt. Gox. Similar transfers were seen in Kraken and Bitstamp before creditors' repayment.
The now-defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox was once the largest platform for Bitcoin transactions. However, it lost its prominence a decade ago when a security breach drained 850,000 BTC from the exchange.
Since the 2014 security breach, thousands of creditors are waiting for repayments from the crypto exchange. Earlier last month, Mt. Gox postponed the repaymentment deadline which was supposed to end on October 31, 2024. The new deadline for repayment is now October 31, 2025, which gives the crypto exchange enough time to prepare.
A decade since Mt. Gox’s collapse, BTC price has undergone a sea change as Bitcoin surged more than 8500% in these 10 years. This has made the defunct creditors of Mt. Gox is more concerned about their BTC tokens as they want to sell them into the market.
Despite the concern, most creditors of the crypto exchange have held onto their digital assets. Mt. Gox distributed 41.5% of its Bitcoin to creditors on July 30 which was an allocation of 59,000 BTC. However, these Bitcoin holders aren't selling the tokens which are worth nearly $4 billion.
A report from Glassnode underlined the temperament when it said: “Creditors opted to receive BTC, rather than fiat, which was new in Japanese bankruptcy law […] As such, it is relatively likely that only a subset of these distributed coins will be truly sold onto the market.”
At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin was trading at $74,540, up by 6.34% in the last 24 hours with a market capitalization of $1.47 trillion. The trading volume of BTC increased by nearly 145% to reach $109.71 billion.