There’s positive news for customers of Mt. Gox, the once industry-leading bitcoin exchange that blew up in spectacular fashion last year, after its creditors began accepting bankruptcy claims.
A notice issued today instructs customers to log-in into their Mt. Gox account at claims.mtgox.com, from where they can make their attempt at reclamation. (There is also an offline option for those who prefer mountains of paperwork.)
Another avenue is to lodge a claim via Kraken, the Korea US-based bitcoin exchange that was last year selected by Mt. Gox’s creditors for reimbursements. Kraken is sweetening the deal a little too by offering up to $1 million of free trades for any Mt. Gox customers who go via its service.
Either way, those filing will need to sign up to, or already have, a Kraken account since any returned coins will be deposited via the service. On that note, returns will be calculated at a rate of $483 per BTC with an additional 6 percent per annum. That’s higher than the current bitcoin price, but Mt. Gox customers should expect to see a partial return on their holdings, as users on this Reddit thread lamented.
If you were a Mt. Gox customer with bitcoin inside the service, you have until May 29 to file your claim. The company’s creditors plan to make a decision on returns by September 9 this year.
Mt. Gox closed off its website and halted transactions in February 2014 after losing (at least) 850,000 bitcoins and generating an outstanding debt of about $63.6 million.
The Tokyo-based company filed for bankruptcy at the end of February, but a recent report suggested that most of its coins were stolen between 2011 and 2013. There have been plenty of accounts of how the team frantically tried to revive its pool of coins — including the apparent use of a trading bot — but, regardless of the reasons, the company’s collapse marked a line in the sand.
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These days bitcoin has matured. Times of maverick businesses like Mt. Gox appear to be over. Today’s top exchanges like Coinbase and BitPay are backed by venture capital firms and reputed institutional investors as the industry moves from being strange, new technology to a payment system that could have mainstream appeal and legitimacy.
