By
Svetlana Soroka
May 11th, 2024
The Mt. Gox trustee has disclosed some more details on the company’s rehabilitation process and confirmed the sale of over $230 million worth of crypto.
It is a widely known fact that cryptocurrency market is strongly influenced by a number of external factors and reacts to all the changes rather quickly. That’s why it is obvious that cryptocurrency investors are trying to monitor attentively the whole market situation in order to understand what changes they can expect to observe in the nearest future.
So, there is little surprise that Bitcoin sell-off confirmed by the trustee of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox attracts wide social attention and make cryptos investors try to guess whether or not there are bigger Mt. Gox trustee-related sell-offs in the future.
Nobuaki Kobayashi, the trustee of Mt. Gox, also known as “Tokyo Whale,” for the enormous amount of Bitcoin he controls, has recently released a new statement which he confirms that he has liquidated 24,658 Bitcoin and 25,331 Bitcoin Cash in the period of around four months between the creditors’ meeting on March 7, 2018, and the start of civil rehabilitation proceedings on June 22, 2018.
In June, a petition to begin civil rehabilitation for the exchange was approved by the authorities which encouraged repaying creditors in BTC and put an end to the Bitcoin sell-offs. In total, given the fact that at that time BTC and BCH were traded for around $8111 and $1195 respectively, the total amount of sold cryptos equals to 25,975,702,352 yen ($230,286,153).
It was not the first case when Kobayashi tried to offload a huge amount of crypto: when the market was experienced a downward trend after the unbelievable growth in December 2017, the trustee liquidated more than $400 million worth of Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash.
Moreover, a lot of cryptocurrency investors and experts actively criticized Kobayashi for doing it as his actions had negative impact on Bitcoin prices. Nevertheless, he claimed that after consultation with cryptocurrency transaction experts he had sold his cryptos in a manner that had no impact on market price.
As for his second major sell-off, there was not such a negative market reaction. According to CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin has fallen from the level of $6,600-6,800 to its current price of $6,539.81.
In his statement, Nobuaki Kobayashi, has noted that there is still nearly $621 million in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash left in the account, which means that some sell-offs may happen causing further drops in the cryptocurrency markets.
Explaining his decision to liquidate such amounts in cryptos, he said:
“[It is] necessary and appropriate to procure a suitable amount of money to secure the interests [of] the creditors for the principal amount and delay damages of the determined and undetermined bankruptcy claims [prior to the trust being set up.]”
Though for those who are waiting for being repaid in fiat for the funds lost by Mt. Gox., such steps may seem to be a great idea, a lot of investors have serious doubts about the future of the crypto markets as, influencing the general market situation, the sales may be a reason for price drops.