(Bloomberg) -- Mt. Gox creditors are receiving a portion of the roughly $8 billion worth of cryptocurrency they’ve been owed since a hack drove the Tokyo-based exchange into bankruptcy a decade ago.
Kraken has distributed Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash from the Mt. Gox estate, according to a post on the X social media platform from the San Francisco-based exchange’s chief executive. A Kraken spokesperson confirmed the distribution and declined to comment on the specific amount.
Bitstamp, another exchange that is working with the trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi, said in a statement Wednesday that it is starting to return Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ether tokens. Recipients will have full control of the assets within a week, the exchange said without providing a specific amount.
The long-anticipated distribution of the billions in Bitcoin from what was once one of the largest crypto exchange has weighed on the digital-asset market for weeks, raising concern that creditors would look to unload the tokens and overwhelm demand. The trustee notified creditors of the pending repayment while Germany was selling Bitcoin that regulators had seized.
Mt. Gox creditors are unlikely to sell a significant proportion of the returned tokens, according to Raghuram Vadapally, a senior fixed income analyst at Carson Capital.
“There’ll be some selling, but not a crazy sale like the German government,” said Vadapally. “They’re not going to dump because they’ve all made huge profits.”
Mt. Gox distributed about $336 million to four separate Bitstamp digital wallet addresses, according to a post Wednesday on X by the blockchain analysis firm Arkham Intelligence. The estate still has about $6 billion in Bitcoin to distribute, the firm estimated.
Not all the estimated $8 billion will be distributed this year. Some creditors elected to wait to get the full amount owed them, so they will get their coins later.
Bitcoin rose for the fifth time in six days, increasing about 1% to $66,632. The largest cryptocurrency by market value is up almost 60% this year.
--With assistance from Olga Kharif.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
