Mt. Gox: What Happened to Its Bitcoin and Repayments

Mt. Gox was a Tokyo bitcoin exchange that at its peak handled most of the world's bitcoin trading. It collapsed in February 2014, saying about 850,000 bitcoins had disappeared. Since April 2014, a court-appointed trustee has managed what was left of the exchange, and its current deadline for repaying customers is October 31, 2026 (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee).

The story is still news because the estate has not finished paying out. On October 9, 2026, two Mt. Gox wallets still held about 34,358 BTC (source: mempool.space), worth roughly $2.8 billion at the October 8 daily close of BloFin's BTCUSDT Perpetual, 81,699.8 USDT. Every time those coins move, headlines ask whether they are about to be sold, so it helps to know how they got there and what the trustee has done with the rest.

Mt. Gox timeline from launch to the 2026 deadline

Mt. Gox's story runs from a website name registered in 2007 to a repayment deadline of October 31, 2026 (source: Wired; MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). News reports often give clashing dates, because the exchange failed in stages over several weeks and its court case changed form twice.

How Mt. Gox became the biggest bitcoin exchange

Mt. Gox started as a website name with nothing to do with bitcoin. Its founder, the American entrepreneur Jed McCaleb, registered the domain in 2007 for a trading site for Magic: The Gathering cards, never built it, and turned the domain into a bitcoin exchange in late 2010 (source: Wired). The name stands for "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange".

In 2011 McCaleb sold the exchange to Mark Karpelès, a French programmer living in Japan, who rewrote its software and built it into the most popular bitcoin exchange in the world. By 2013 it handled about 70% of all bitcoin trades (source: CoinDesk). That lead was already slipping by early 2014, when Reuters reported that people in the industry saw Mt. Gox as a diminished player. Rivals such as Bitstamp had gained ground, and concerns had grown about its technology and safety (source: Reuters, quoted by NPR on MPR News).

Like any exchange, Mt. Gox held its customers' coins for them: it controlled the private keys, and each customer had a balance in its database. How exchange wallets work explains the hot and cold wallets an exchange runs.

How Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014

Mt. Gox collapsed in February 2014. It stopped bitcoin withdrawals on February 7, blaming technical problems, and took its website and trading offline on February 24 (source: CoinDesk). On February 28 it asked a Tokyo court for protection from its creditors, saying bitcoins had disappeared and its bank balances fell short of what customers had deposited (source: MtGox Co., Ltd.).

News reports at the time called the filing bankruptcy protection. Legally it was an application for civil rehabilitation, a Japanese procedure that lets a company keep running while it repays creditors. The court dismissed that application on April 16 (source: MtGox Co., Ltd.). On April 24, 2014 it put Mt. Gox into bankruptcy and appointed the lawyer Nobuaki Kobayashi as bankruptcy trustee (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). Kobayashi still runs the estate, now as its rehabilitation trustee.

The collapse looked sudden, but the bitcoin had been leaving for years. Researchers at WizSec traced the missing coins and concluded that most were stolen straight out of the exchange's hot wallet a little at a time from late 2011 (source: WizSec). That meant the exchange had been insolvent long before February 2014.

Transaction malleability and Mt. Gox's explanation

Transaction malleability is a flaw in early bitcoin that let someone change a transaction's ID before it was confirmed, so a sender could be fooled into thinking a payment had failed and send it again. Mt. Gox blamed this flaw, saying in its February 2014 filing that attackers had abused a bug in bitcoin and that coins might have been moved illicitly (source: MtGox Co., Ltd.).

Two researchers at ETH Zurich tested that claim against more than a year of bitcoin network data. They found the flaw was real but rarely used before the collapse. At most about 386 bitcoins could have been stolen that way before Mt. Gox stopped withdrawals, a tiny share of what it lost (source: Decker and Wattenhofer, ETH Zurich).

How much bitcoin did Mt. Gox lose?

Mt. Gox first said it had lost about 850,000 bitcoins: roughly 750,000 belonging to customers and about 100,000 of its own. On March 7, 2014 it found 199,999.99 BTC in an old wallet last used before June 2011, which cut the missing total to about 650,000 BTC (source: MtGox Co., Ltd.).

When the exchange failed, the 850,000 missing coins were worth nearly $480 million (source: NPR on MPR News). Mt. Gox also reported a gap of about 2.8 billion yen, or $27.4 million at the time, between the cash it held and the cash customers had deposited (source: MtGox Co., Ltd.; Reuters via Yahoo News). You will see both 850,000 and 650,000 quoted: the first is the original claim, and the second is what stayed missing after the find.

The roughly 200,000 recovered coins became the core of the estate that is still being paid out today, along with cash the trustee later raised by selling some of them.

Who stole Mt. Gox's bitcoin?

US prosecutors say two Russian nationals, Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, broke into the server holding Mt. Gox's wallets around September 2011. According to the 2023 charges, they and others then stole about 647,000 bitcoins between September 2011 and at least May 2014, the vast majority of customers' coins (source: US Department of Justice).

Both men are charged with laundering, and a charge is only an allegation until it is proved in court. Another Russian, Alexander Vinnik, was arrested in Greece in 2017. US prosecutors accused him of laundering funds from the Mt. Gox hack through exchanges including BTC-e, which he ran (source: US Attorney's Office, Northern District of California). In May 2024 he pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy over BTC-e, and the Justice Department's announcement of the plea does not mention Mt. Gox (source: US Department of Justice). In February 2025 he was reportedly sent back to Russia in a prisoner swap, which the US government had not officially confirmed at the time (source: The Record).

What happened to Mt. Gox's CEO, Mark Karpelès?

Mark Karpelès was arrested in Japan in August 2015. In March 2019 the Tokyo District Court cleared him of embezzlement and breach of trust but convicted him of manipulating electronic records. His prison sentence of two and a half years was suspended for four years, so he did not have to serve it (source: AP via Fox Business).

The falsified records had inflated Mt. Gox's holdings by $33.5 million, while prosecutors had asked for a 10-year sentence (source: CNN). The Tokyo High Court rejected his appeal in June 2020 and upheld the conviction and the suspended sentence (source: CoinDesk). He was never convicted of stealing customers' bitcoin.

Why Mt. Gox creditors are repaid in bitcoin

Mt. Gox creditors get part of their claim back in bitcoin because their case was moved out of bankruptcy in 2018. Under Japanese bankruptcy law, a claim for bitcoin is converted into a yen claim fixed at the bitcoin price when the bankruptcy began, which was April 2014, and paid in cash (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee).

That rule would have frozen every claim at a 2014 bitcoin price, while bitcoin itself was worth more than ten times as much by June 2018 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; NPR on MPR News). In November 2017 a group of creditors asked the court to switch the case to civil rehabilitation, which does not convert bitcoin claims into yen. The Tokyo District Court agreed on June 22, 2018 and put the bankruptcy on hold (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee).

Before the switch, the trustee sold some bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash between December 2017 and February 2018, and said the estate held about 44 billion yen in cash, worth roughly $415 million at the exchange rate of the day (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee; FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).

The trustee's repayment plan went to a vote in 2021. On October 20, 2021, about 99% of the creditors who voted approved it, holding about 83% of the voting rights by amount, and the court confirmed the plan the same day (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). It became final and binding on November 16, 2021.

How Mt. Gox repayments work and when they are due

Creditors are repaid partly in bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and partly in cash, under a rehabilitation plan with three parts: the base repayment, the early lump-sum repayment and the intermediate repayment. The trustee's current deadline for finishing them is October 31, 2026 (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee).

Why creditors receive Bitcoin Cash as well

Bitcoin Cash is in the estate because the estate held bitcoin through a split in the bitcoin network. On August 1, 2017, a dispute over how much data a block should carry ended with part of the network continuing under separate rules as Bitcoin Cash. The two chains share every block up to 478,558, which was mined at 13:16 UTC that day (source: mempool.space), and anyone holding bitcoin at that moment held the same number of coins on the new chain. The estate held about 200,000 BTC, so it acquired a matching amount of Bitcoin Cash without buying any, and bitcoin forks explained covers how a split does this.

The same thing happened twice more. The trustee told creditors in March 2018 that it also held Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond, two later splits, and that nothing had been decided about selling them (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). Every repayment the trustee has announced since has been in bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash only.

What creditors had to do to be paid

Creditors made their choices online by April 6, 2023, the trustee's selection deadline (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). They chose whether to take an early lump-sum payment, how to receive cash, and whether to take part of their bitcoin claim as bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash through a designated exchange or custodian (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). Those were the four routes: the early lump-sum payment, payment of part of a cryptocurrency claim in cryptocurrency, a bank transfer, or a transfer through a payment service provider.

Missing that deadline did not cancel a claim, but it did cut the creditor off from all four routes. The trustee warned in October 2022 that anyone who had not completed the step would have to collect their money in yen, in cash and in person, at the Mt. Gox head office, and that money they did not collect would be deposited with the Legal Affairs Bureau, the government office that holds funds a creditor has not taken (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). That is the practical reason the deadline keeps moving. The trustee is not waiting on the coins, which have sat untouched in two addresses for months. It is waiting on people.

The first coins went out on July 5, 2024, when the trustee paid bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to some creditors through designated exchanges (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). News reports name Kraken and Bitstamp among those exchanges (source: CryptoBriefing). More rounds followed in July and August 2024 and from January to March 2025.

By March 2025 the trustee had paid bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to more than 19,500 creditors, and was paying others in cash from selling coins (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). News reports estimate about 24,000 creditors in total (source: Decrypt).

The deadline for those repayments has moved five times. Two of those moves came early, while creditors were still registering. After that, the trustee extended the deadline by a year at a time, each time with the court's permission (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee).

In its October 2025 notice the trustee said it had largely completed the three repayments for creditors who had finished the required steps without problems. Many creditors had still not finished the steps needed to be paid, however, and others had hit problems along the way (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee).

How much bitcoin does Mt. Gox still hold?

Mt. Gox's estate held about 34,358 BTC in two wallets on October 9, 2026. One wallet holds 24,051.76 BTC and has sent nothing since it received them on December 5, 2024. The other holds 10,306.35 BTC and has sent nothing since it received them on June 2, 2026 (source: mempool.space).

The June move made the news: the estate moved 10,422.65 BTC, then worth about $739 million, sending 10,306.35 BTC to a new address and 116.30 BTC to its hot wallet (source: CoinDesk). The hot wallet passed those 116.30 BTC on within about two hours, while the 10,306.35 BTC have stayed put, so most of the move was a transfer between the estate's own wallets (source: mempool.space).

Other totals you may see come from Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain analytics firm, which put the wallets at 34,689 BTC in October 2025 (source: Decrypt) and 34,387.51 BTC on September 30, 2026 (source: CryptoBriefing). The difference between them is two small transfers out through the hot wallet in between, of 185.52 BTC in November 2025 and 116.30 BTC in June 2026. Arkham's total is also about 29 BTC higher than the two wallets on their own, probably because it also counts small balances on other addresses it labels as Mt. Gox.

You can follow the wallets yourself by pasting either address into a block explorer, which shows the balance and every transaction, and how to use a bitcoin block explorer walks through what each field means. The same method works for any large holder, which is the basis of whale watching on-chain.

What happened to bitcoin's price when Mt. Gox paid out?

Bitcoin fell in the weeks before the 2024 Mt. Gox repayments began, and rose while most of them went out. On FRED's daily prices, bitcoin dropped 17.2% between May 28, 2024, when the estate moved about 141,686 BTC into new wallets, and July 5, the first repayment day (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).

FRED, the St. Louis Fed's economic database, takes each daily price at 5PM Pacific (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), and each change runs from the price on the day of the event. Bitcoin's low for July 2024 came on July 7, two days after the first payout. The price then climbed for three weeks while coins kept going to creditors, ending July 2024 3.1% above its June 30 price (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).

Numbers like these cannot tell you how much of a move came from Mt. Gox and how much from everything else in the market. After the June 2026 transfer, for example, CoinDesk linked that week's fall to other news, including the company Strategy's first publicized bitcoin sale and a record run of outflows from US spot bitcoin ETFs (source: CoinDesk). Bitcoin moves a lot anyway: since mid-2015, it has risen or fallen by 10% or more over 30 days more than half the time (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).

The trustee has warned against reading a transfer as a sale. In 2018 Kobayashi wrote that moving coins from the estate's addresses does not necessarily mean he sold them at that time (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). A wallet alert tells you that coins moved, but not who will sell them or when, and why bitcoin is dropping shows how to check the usual causes of a fall before blaming one headline.

To see how bitcoin reacts the next time Mt. Gox coins move, keep the BTCUSDT Perpetual chart open beside a block explorer, and watch whether the coins reach an exchange or only move between the estate's own wallets. Spot versus perpetual futures sets out how that contract differs from holding the coin.

What happens at the October 31, 2026 deadline?

The Tokyo court sets the deadline in Japan Standard Time, nine hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time, so it runs out at 15:00 UTC on October 31, 2026: 11am in New York, 3pm in London. At that point the trustee's remaining repayments fall due, unless it extends the deadline again with the court's permission, as it has every year since 2023. It has announced no change: as of October 9, 2026 its newest notice is a December 2025 holiday notice, and its last deadline notice is the October 2025 extension (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee).

Each of the past three extension notices came between six weeks and four days before the deadline it replaced, so October 9 already falls inside the window in which the trustee has announced the past two. The estate still holds coins for any repayments still due.

Neither an extension nor a final round of payouts tells you what bitcoin's price will do, and no one can know in advance whether a payout leads to selling. Creditors who receive coins can keep them, and many have waited more than ten years. The useful signals to watch are the trustee's notices on its website and any movement out of the two wallets towards an exchange.

What Mt. Gox means for crypto you keep on an exchange

Mt. Gox shows the main risk of keeping crypto on an exchange: your balance is a number in the exchange's database, and it is only as good as the coins the exchange really holds. Mt. Gox was technically insolvent for years and almost out of bitcoin by 2013 (source: WizSec), yet its customers kept trading there until February 2014.

Two habits protect you against a repeat: the first is checking whether an exchange publishes proof that it holds its customers' assets, which proof of reserves explains. The second is moving coins you are not trading into a wallet you control, which self-custody covers step by step.

How to trade bitcoin around Mt. Gox news

Mt. Gox headlines tend to arrive as wallet alerts with large dollar figures, and bitcoin can swing hard on them before anyone knows whether coins were sold. Plan your trade around the risk of that swing, never around the headline alone.

Decide your stop loss before you enter. Say you hold 1,000 USDT and will risk no more than 2%, or 20 USDT, on one trade. If you place your stop 8% below your entry, your position can be no bigger than 250 USDT, because 8% of 250 is 20. A wider stop gives the trade more room to survive a headline, and the cost of that room is a smaller position.

Leverage makes headline swings more dangerous, because a sharp move can close a leveraged position before the news is even confirmed. Read how your liquidation price is set before you trade the BTCUSDT Perpetual around a deadline.

If you would rather not trade the news yourself, BloFin lets you copy BTCUSDT Perpetual positions from lead traders and set your own limits on size and leverage. A copied position follows the lead trader in and out, so read how copying a futures trader works before you start.

To get started, create a BloFin account, add crypto to your BloFin account, and open the BTC/USDT Spot trading page, the BTC/USDC Spot trading page, the BTCUSDT Perpetual, the BTCUSD Perpetual or the lead traders you can copy on BTC.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still get my bitcoin back from Mt. Gox?

Only if you are already a registered Mt. Gox creditor. The period for filing claims ended on October 22, 2018. In October 2019 the trustee said that, in principle, it would not back late claims delivered after November 18, 2019, and the court decides whether any late claim is accepted (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). The trustee did approve balances from Mt. Gox's own database that users never filed (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee). The trustee warns that sites offering to migrate Mt. Gox accounts are fraudulent, and it uses only www.mtgox.com, claims.mtgox.com and material.mtgox.com (source: MtGox Co., Ltd. trustee).

Has Mt. Gox recovered any funds?

Yes. After a consolidation on May 28, 2024, the estate's wallets held about 141,686 BTC, and about 107,000 of those have left the wallets since, mostly in July 2024 (source: mempool.space). That is about three quarters of the coins the estate held after the consolidation.

When was Mt. Gox hacked?

Mt. Gox was hacked more than once. In June 2011 attackers took the equivalent of $8.75 million, months before the theft that later emptied the exchange began. When Mt. Gox closed in February 2014, Wired described it as the second time the exchange had been hacked (source: Wired).

How much is the stolen Mt. Gox bitcoin worth today?

The roughly 650,000 bitcoins still missing from Mt. Gox would be worth about $53.1 billion at BloFin's BTCUSDT daily close of 81,699.8 USDT on October 8, 2026. That is about 3.1% of the 21 million bitcoins that will ever exist. When the exchange failed in 2014, the same 650,000 coins were worth a little under $370 million, going by the nearly $480 million that all 850,000 were worth then (source: NPR on MPR News).

What is the difference between Mt. Gox and FTX?

The biggest difference is what creditors get back. FTX, which collapsed in November 2022, repays customers in dollars based on what their accounts were worth then, when bitcoin was about $16,000. FTX estimated that its 2024 plan would pay at least 118% of that value (source: Reuters via CBC). Mt. Gox creditors receive part of their claim as bitcoin itself, so that part kept bitcoin's later rise. FTX also told the court it was down to 105 bitcoins against the nearly 100,000 its customers were owed, about 0.1% (source: CoinDesk).

Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Sources include the MtGox Co., Ltd. rehabilitation trustee, the US Department of Justice, FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), CoinDesk, Decrypt, Wired, NPR, AP, CNN, Reuters, The Record, CryptoBriefing, WizSec, ETH Zurich researchers, mempool.space and BloFin, current as of October 9, 2026.

This article is educational and general in nature, not financial or investment advice. Mt. Gox news can move bitcoin's price sharply in either direction before the facts are known, and a leveraged position opened on a wallet alert can be liquidated, losing all the margin behind it. Anyone offering to recover Mt. Gox funds for a fee may be running a scam. Past performance does not indicate future results. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset. BloFin services are not available in restricted locations, including the United States. Do your own research, and consider a licensed professional before making financial decisions. BloFin does not provide investment advice.