Bitcoin seesaws as investors stare down Mt. Gox’s looming $8.5B crypto repayment
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Slidin’ down the mountain… Bitcoin had a rough week. The OG crypto fell below $60K on Monday and has struggled to climb back to its mid-March highs. The price stumble came after Mt. Gox, a defunct bitcoin exchange, said it would start repaying $8.5B in bitcoin and bitcoin cash to its creditors next month. Some investors feared the newly coin-rich creditors might immediately sell their crypto, which could flood the market and push prices down.
Adding fuel: Traders pointed to the German gov’t, which last week was said to have sold $325M in BTC seized from the operators of a movie-piracy site (authorities confiscated ~$3B).
Dragged down: Crypto-linked companies like Coinbase and MicroStrategy also saw their share prices slip early this week.
Worth the wait… Tokyo-based Mt. Gox collapsed and declared bankruptcy in 2014 after a series of hacks, placing 24K customers’ digi assets in legal limbo. At the time, one bitcoin was worth ~$600. Now the Mt. Gox users who’ve been waiting a decade will be (partially) repaid coins worth more than 100x that amount. But not everyone thinks they’ll rush to cash in on their newfound coin wealth. Galaxy Research, a digital asset and blockchain biz, wrote on X that many creditors had the opportunity to sell their claims long ago. Aka: if those Mt. Gox customers are still holding out, they may be in crypto for the long haul.
The “future of finance” is working through its past… Crypto keeps striding toward the mainstream with developments like spot bitcoin ETFs, but its foundation was built on rough patches in the margins. Like: Mt. Gox started as a place to trade “Magic: The Gathering” cards. Those rough spots showed up in the markets this week.