Mt. Gox Moves Over $700M Worth of BTC to Unknown Wallet

Mt. Gox has once again made headlines after an address associated with the defunct crypto exchange moved 13,265 BTC valued at $784 million early Wednesday. 

According to data from the blockchain analytics firm, Arkham intelligence, 12,000 BTC out of the total amount was transferred to an unknown wallet starting with “1PuQB…”

The remaining 1,265 BTC, worth over $74 million, were then sent to the address “1Jbez,” which Arkham identified as a Mt. Gox cold wallet. Notably, the funds have not moved since. 

This transfer comes just a week after BitGo moved a majority of the $2 billion worth of BTC it had received from Mt. Gox to a new wallet after a test transaction. At the time of reporting, Mt. Gox still has over 46,000 BTC left. 

Mt. Gox Reimbursement Continues 

The transferred funds are speculated to go toward the exchange’s creditor reimbursement plans. Creditors have been waiting for 10 years to get their crypto back after Mt. Gox suffered a devastating hack in 2014 that led to the theft of 850,000 BTC and its insolvency. 

The exchange had commenced repayments in BTC and BCH earlier in July. According to data from CryptoQuant, Mt. Gox has distributed over 68% of its funds back to creditors. 

Analysts, however, believe that Mt. Gox would likely not repay creditors with the total amount moved. In an X post, Galaxy Digital’s head of research, Alex Thorn, noted that only a small portion of the funds will go towards repaying creditors while the rest goes into a new cold storage still owned by the exchange. 

CORRECTION — in a prior tweet i said mt gox tx’d $1.5bn onchain. it was half that — $700m. (sorry, i misread my alerts)

AND, we now think that of the 13,265 BTC moved in this tx, only 1,265 ($74.5m) is meant to distro, w/ 12,000 going to estate fresh cold storage

so, very small

— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) August 21, 2024

Bitcoin Drops Below $60k

Mt. Gox’s latest BTC move appears to have negatively impacted the market, with bitcoin dropping over 2%, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The asset was trading at 59,600 at press time.