Mt. Gox's Bitcoin billions are on the move again—and the leading cryptocurrency's price is on the rise.
Blockchain data tracking firm Arkham Intelligence on Tuesday flagged on-chain movements from a crypto address that had received over $2 billion in Bitcoin from the collapsed exchange.
The address, Arkham said, had initiated test transactions ahead of expected repayments to affected users—and then the entire balance of over 33,000 BTC (worth $2 billion at the current price) was moved to another wallet.
Arkham said that the address was most likely tied to crypto firm BitGo, one of the entities tasked with repaying customers who lost their Bitcoin in the hack over a decade ago.
BREAKING: Bitgo has just moved $2B of Mt. Gox BTC. pic.twitter.com/3aPFPhmGGN
— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) August 13, 2024
Four other crypto exchanges—Bitbank, Bitstamp, Kraken, and SBI VC Trade—have started repaying customers who lost funds in the hack.
The distribution of coins has led to the price of Bitcoin to fall in recent weeks, as traders and market observers expect future selling when massive stashes of Bitcoin are moved. The customers who lost money in the Mt. Gox hack would have made monumental returns as the price of Bitcoin was less than $500 when the exchange collapsed more than 10 years ago.
But this time around, the move has been followed by a rise in the coin's price. Bitcoin is now trading for over $61,000, rising by approximately 3% over the course of an hour (from a price around $59,500) after the sizable on-chain move.
Even so, Bitcoin remains down from its all-time high price of nearly $74,000 back in March. The price dipped below $50,000 as recently as just over a week ago.
Mt. Gox was a popular Bitcoin exchange headquartered in Japan. But hackers stole 850,000 of the digital coins from the platform through an ongoing exploit, and the exchange shut down in 2014 after filing for bankruptcy.
Law enforcement managed to find and retrieve 140,000 Bitcoins from the hack years later. Only now are former customers are only now getting back their funds under a rehabilitation proposal approved in 2021.
Edited by Andrew Hayward