Mt. Gox to Release $9 Billion in Bitcoin in July

The old Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox is getting ready to give out about $9 billion worth of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to its creditors in July 2024. Yep, you read that right! This big move has been eagerly anticipated as a way to pay back the people who got hurt when the exchange went bust back in 2014 – a whopping 127,000 of them!

Back in May 2024, Mt. Gox switched around 141,686 BTC (that's about $9.62 billion) to a new wallet. That was just the start of getting things rolling again. Nobuaki Kobayashi, the trustee overseeing this whole thing, said that this transfer is all part of making sure everyone gets what they're owed. They'll be giving back both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash – a total of 142,000 Bitcoin and 143,000 Bitcoin Cash – bit by bit based on how ready the different places handling it are.

Now, with such a huge amount of Bitcoin entering the market like this, folks are starting to wonder what'll happen next. Could this flood of coins lead to a bunch of selling and mess up how stable Bitcoin's price is? There've already been some not-so-great reactions from the market, with Bitcoin prices going down by 2% right after the repayment plan was announced.

It's been more than ten years now that these creditors have been waiting for an end to this wild bit of cryptocurrency history. Back in its prime, Mt. Gox ran more than 70% of all Bitcoin transactions before everything went haywire with a giant hack that lost them 850,000 BTC. The plan they finally made for paying everyone back was first supposed to be done by October 2023 but now it looks like we'll have to wait until October 2024 – maybe even longer.

As everyone in the crypto world watches closely, this big repayment could really shake up how things work in the market. Will these creditors hang onto their stuff or will we see a whole bunch of it being sold off? We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out in this next phase for Mt. Gox and everything else happening in the cryptocurrency field.