By
Tolu Ajiboye
April 23rd, 2024
Pierce charts the new plans of repaying the Mt. Gox victims through the creation of a new company under the same brand and its native cryptocurrency Gox Coin.
It has been five years since the hack of once most popular Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox which lost 850,000 Bitcoins tokens overnight. However, the exchange has kept the Bitcoin community engaged and interested with several mysteries attached to it. Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles is facing serious allegations of siphoning millions of dollars worth investors’ funds. There is also a possibility that Karpeles could face a 10-year jail term on charges of embezzlement, data manipulation, and breach of trust.
Despite all this, venture capitalist Brock Pierce has arrived with a recovery plan to help the victims of the Mt. Gox hack. Pierce is popular in the crypto-investment space and has backed billion-dollar projects like EOS and Tether, in the past. The new plan derived by Pierce, called as “Gox Rising” aims to help the victims of the Mt. Gox in getting their funds back.
The GoxRising Plan to Help Mt. Gox Victims
The plan of “GoxRising – A Unified Push for Maximum Recovery” came into existence last month. It is a singular, unified Civil Rehabilitation Plan that aims to remove the existing barriers and maximize creditors recovery. Pierce plans to do this from the 150,000 BTC tokens recovered during the investigations done over the last few years.
Pierce is holding a stake in the Mt. Gox exchange which he had bought when the exchange was falling apart in 2014. Talking about his new plan, Pierce says:
“The GoxRising movement aims to restore the creditors’ losses as well as the world’s faith in the cryptocurrency industry.”
While speaking to TechCruch, Pierce said that he plans to bring the investors together and act on their behalf when approaching Mt Gox creditors. The publication notes that “The plan is to have users join the committee there so they can present a united voice to creditor Kobayashi about how they want Mt. Gox’s assets distributed.”
Although not directly, Pierce suggested that he can help investors get back their lost funds. He said:
“I think that would allow the process to move faster than it would otherwise…Things are on track to be resolved in the next three to five years. If [a majority of creditors sign on] this could be resolved in maybe 1 year.”
Pierce also holds some plans to later re-launch the Mt Gox exchange “that doesn’t provide custody itself for higher security”.
Proposal for Introducing Gox Coin
Interestingly, Pierce’s plan also holds a proposal for creating a new cryptocurrency called Gox Coin to repay the investors. Using this Gox Coin digital currency Pierce plans to give the original Mt Gox creditors a stake in the new company. Further, he plans to wipe out entire Mt Gox equity including his own.
Later on, Pierce plans to arrange to finance and tokenize an independent foundation governed by the creditors that will seek to recover additional lost Mt. Gox assets and then distribute them pro rata to the Gox Coin holders. Although Pierce is pretty hopeful of his plans there are several questions that remain unanswered. Like the regulatory status for Gox Coin.
“We want to offer [creditors] more than the bankruptcy trustee can do on its own. If the exchange is very successful I stand to benefit sometime down the road. Whether we’re successful or not, I want to see the creditors made whole,” at last, he notes.