Recently, after weeks of being quiet, the once-famous cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox sent 13,265 Bitcoin (BTC) worth $784 million to bank addresses that are not known. This is Mt. Gox’s first big trade since the end of July, which has led to more talk about how it might affect the bitcoin market as a whole.
On August 20, 12,000 Bitcoin, which is worth over $700 million, were sent to an address that hadn’t been used before. Arkham Intelligence sent an extra 1,265 BTC, which is worth about $75 million, to a wallet that they knew was one of Mt. Gox’s cold storage accounts. These funds have not been touched since then.
Crypto fans and experts are talking about this big move of Bitcoin. Some people think that Mt. Gox might be getting ready to give more of its leftover Bitcoin to creditors who have been waiting years to get their money back since the exchange went bankrupt in 2014. But Galaxy’s head of research, Alex Thorn, says that only a small part of these funds—about $75 million—may be meant to be distributed. He thinks that the owners of Mt. Gox might move the rest of the money to a new cold storage site.
Mt. Gox sent 47,229 BTC to several unknown wallets on July 30, which was similar to what’s going on now. At that time, some people thought that BitGo, a manager that worked with Mt. Gox, had gotten some of these funds.
Currently, Mt. Gox has a large amount of bitcoin, 46,164 bitcoin, worth about $2.7 billion. Even though Mt. Gox gave back a lot of the exchange’s assets to its creditors, it still owns a lot of them and is waiting for more action to be taken.
It’s interesting that many of Mt. Gox’s debtors, who were early adopters of Bitcoin, still seem to be hanging on to their money. Experts in the field say that these creditors may be betting that prices will go up in the future and are probably waiting for the right time to sell in order to get the most money back. Also, selling right away could lead to big capital gains taxes, which some buyers might want to put off by keeping their assets.
The latest Bitcoin movement at Mt. Gox adds another layer of mystery to the ongoing story of the now-defunct exchange. It’s still too early to tell if this will cause the market to drop or help it enter the next part of a bull run, but the cautious positivity among creditors suggests that many are betting on the latter.
