Bitcoin is still reeling from the fact that yesterday, a wallet belonging to defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox moved over $9 billion in BTC to an unknown wallet, possibly intended to repay creditors.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin's price has recovered to $68,000 after dropping to $67,555.01 early this morning. According to Coinglass, Bitcoin's open balance has increased 1% over the past day and now stands at $35 billion.
The drop marks a sharp retreat for BTC, which only just rose above the $70,000 mark yesterday after it was revealed that Argentina was meeting with El Salvadoran officials to discuss the possibility of adopting Bitcoin as legal tender.
However, activity in Mt. Gox wallets tends to scare investors, raising concerns that large amounts of BTC could be sold off in the market, sparking a wave of volatility.
Mt. Gox was one of the world's first and largest bitcoin exchanges before filing for bankruptcy in 2014. The funds were transferred overnight in 68 2,000-BTC increments and deposited in unidentified bitcoin wallets. The transfers represent roughly half of Mt. Gox's total holdings. The company still holds $9.4 billion worth of BTC in multiple cold wallets, according to blockchain analytics firm Arcam Analytics.
The wallet appears to have been created last week. As of early Tuesday morning, the wallet still contained approximately $9.6 billion worth of Bitcoin, with the received BTC yet to be moved.
Mt. Gox was founded by Jed McCaleb and began offering Bitcoin trading in 2010, before he sold it to Mark Karpeles in 2011. The exchange played a major role in the early days of Bitcoin trading, handling around 70% of Bitcoin transactions worldwide at its peak.
However, being the first and largest Bitcoin exchange came with many challenges.
Between 2011 and 2014, the exchange suffered a series of attacks, service disruptions, and pressure from regulators to shut down, filing for bankruptcy after it emerged that hackers had stolen around 850,000 BTC (worth $450 million at the time, roughly $58 billion today).
Since then, about 200,000 BTC has been recovered, but many creditors are still waiting for repayment.
Last September, Mt. Gox's trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, extended the deadline for repaying creditors by one year, to October 31, 2024.
