Mt. Gox begins repaying bitcoin to creditors a decade after exchange's collapse — what it means

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The trustee for Mt. Gox, the Japanese bitcoin exchange that collapsed into bankruptcy a decade ago, on Friday said that the company has begun to make payments in bitcoin and in bitcoin cash to some of its creditors.

The announcement added that repayments to other users of the hacked exchange would be "promptly made" if they meet certain conditions, including undergoing account verification, as well as subscribing to one of the designated digital asset exchanges through which the bankruptcy estate is facilitating disbursements in digital tokens.

"We ask eligible rehabilitation creditors to wait for a while," continues the statement.

The price of bitcoin has plunged nearly 6% in the last 24 hours.

Customers of the Tokyo-based exchange have been waiting 10 years to get their money back.

Once the world's largest crypto trading venue, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 after a series of heists that saw up to 950,000 bitcoin — worth upward of $58 billion at today's prices — vanish.

Mt. Gox blamed the bitcoin disappearance on a bug in the cryptocurrency's framework. While users were receiving incomplete transaction messages when accessing the exchange, coins may have actually been illicitly moved by hackers out of their accounts, Mt. Gox said.

After declaring bankruptcy, 140,000 of the missing bitcoin were recovered — which means that roughly $9 billion worth of bitcoin will be returned to owners, in today's prices. Bitcoin was trading at roughly $600 at the time of the bankruptcy. Today it's worth over $54,000 — an almost 9,000% increase.

According to data from Arkham Intelligence, on Thursday and Friday, Mt. Gox moved billions of dollars in bitcoin from its crypto wallets ahead of the