- The notorious bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox will return $9 billion worth of Bitcoin to creditors.
- Interest in a Bitcoin ETF has also grown significantly in recent days.
Bitcoin [BTC] The recent price rally has created optimism across the cryptocurrency market, but this optimism may not last long.
Will Mt.Gox lead to further Bitcoin losses?
A decade after a devastating hack, a collapsed bitcoin exchange has finally returned billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency to users.
Mt. Gox, the bankrupt Tokyo-based exchange that once dominated the bitcoin market, plans to start paying back thousands of users in early July.
The payout amounts to roughly $9 billion in tokens, a fraction of the 650,000 to 950,000 bitcoins stolen in 2014. At the time, the stolen coins were worth much less, but at today’s prices they would be worth more than $59 billion.
The return came after a lengthy and tedious bankruptcy process riddled with delays and legal obstacles. Finally, on July 1, the court-appointed trustee overseeing the case announced it would begin distributing the funds to Mt. Gox’s roughly 20,000 creditors.
Repayments will be made in a combination of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, an earlier variant of the original cryptocurrency.
While the long-awaited payout is good news for users who lost their bitcoin in the hack, it comes at a worrying time for the cryptocurrency market.
Prices plummeted to $59,000 last week, the second-worst weekly drop this year, and a massive influx of bitcoin from Mt. Gox could push prices even lower, spooking some investors.
Hope is not completely lost
While the Mt. Gox sale may impact BTC prices in the short term, institutional investors and crypto whales have not lost interest in BTC, as evidenced by the high inflows into ETFs seen in the past 24 hours.
Bitcoin Spot ETFs continued to see inflows on July 1, marking the fifth consecutive day of inflows. Net inflows for the day totaled $129 million.
Read Bitcoin [BTC] Price Forecast 2024-25
Fidelity’s FBTC ETF topped the list with $65,034,000 in inflows on the day. Bitwise’s BITB ETF also saw strong inflows on the day, recording $41,402,200 in inflows.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $62,788.49, down 0.78% in price over the past 24 hours, while trading volume also increased by 5.5%.
Source: Sosovalue
