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What happened to the biggest crypto exchange Mt. Gox?

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Have you ever heard of the word Mt. Gox? Probably not, neither have I, so what is the Mt. Gox and what was it about?

Around 2010 and 2014, the Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange operated was Mt. Gox, the exchange platform was known or considered as the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world and was actually responsible for over 70% of all the Bitcoin transactions that was in place. However for some reason the exchange declared bankruptcy in the year 2014, but speculations is still ongoing and lawsuits as well involving in the exchange.

Mt. Gox claimed the reason that they filed for bankruptcy was due to a hack and that the hackers stolen assets that is equal to $460m which took the world by a surprise and it was said it’s impossible for that to happen to the world largest leading crypto exchange and the only option for that to happen is mismanagement of the company and also Identifying those responsible is still an ongoing process for Mt. Gox. The co-founder of Ripple was the created of Mt. Gox exchange website and it was created by Jed McCaleb.

What really caused the fall of the biggest Bitcoin exchange?

It’s not a surprise that it would receive an attack from hackers but it’s popularity will definitely make it a target and over the years of the exchange availability, there have always been an issue of security challenges making the operation vulnerable. The first hack occurred in 2011 and in this attack the equivalent amount the hackers got away with it was about $8m - $8.75m.
Three years later in February 2014, Mt. Gox came out to the public that they’ve identified for bugs and suspicious activities that they will be suspending all withdrawals on the exchange which made the price of BTC drop by 20% that year. What pushed the company Mt. Gox to point where they couldn’t provide their services was when they could only recover 200,000 Bitcoin out of 850,000 bitcoins that were missing and couldn’t recover the remaining 650,000 which is equivalent to $450 million. So they had no choice than to file for bankruptcy in Tokyo district court in the year 2014 while also asked to liquidate their assets but was left in a debt of above $63 million.

*So now what is the future of Mt. Gox?

After the collapse till date, investors are still in legal battles trying to recover their long lost funds and surprisingly Bitcoin went on a spike increase in price after the Mt. Gox exchange break down. Late last year in November, an announcement was made that the creditors of Mt. Gox are going to receive 0ver $8 billion in the repayments of the break down incident in 2014 and those affected are likely to get the repayment in the first half or second half of this year 2021.

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