This Day In Crypto History @ 28 February - Mt Gox Files for Bankruptcy
A quick catchup for 28 February after a Sunday Skipday.
Just one event has dominated findings for 28 February.
In 2014 it was a significant day for the crypto world with bankruptcy of the Mt Gox exchange.
28 February 2014 - Mt Gox Files for Bankruptcy
Founded originally by Jed McCaleb as a short-lived trading site for Magic The Gathering Online cards, Mt Gox rebirthed in July 2010 as one of the first Bitcoin exchanges.
Early in 2011 McCaleb sold the site to French developer Mark Karpelès.
With Karpelès at the helm Mt Gox rapidly grew to become the world's largest Bitcoin exchange handling, by 2014, 70% of all Bitcoin trades.
The growth of the exchange was not without controversy. Hacks in June 2011 saw the loss of around 25,000 BTC and the price to temporarily drop to 1 cent.
2013 saw a string of issues with account restrictions with payment company Dwolla, with an unplanned Bitcoin fork, with lawsuits with CoinLab, with warrants for money seizure the from US Department of Homeland Security, and with extensive withdrawal delays.
Problems continued in 2014, when on 7 February Mt Gox halted all withdrawals. The situation continued to deteriorate over the next couple of weeks with growing concerns among customers about the financial status of the exchange.
On 24 February Mt Gox suspended all trading and its website went offline. Leaked internal documents suggested that the exchange had lost over 740,000 BTC.
The situation came to a head on 28 February when Mt Gox filed in Tokyo for a form of bankruptcy protection from creditors, reporting that it had liabilities of about 6.5 billion yen and 3.84 billion yen in assets.
The company stated that it had lost almost 750,000 of its customers' Bitcoins, and around 100,000 of its own Bitcoins, worth around $473 million in total.
During February and March 2014 while these issues were unfolding at Mt Gox Bitcoin lost 36% of its value.
In 2015 Mark Karpelès was arrested by Japanese police on suspicion of having accessed the exchange's computer system to falsify data. He was found guilty in 2019.
The aftermath of the Mt Gox failure rumbled on for several years. In December 2020 the Mt Gox Trustee finally submitted the Draft Rehabilitation Plan.
Project Update
We now closing the door on the first month for the This Day in Crypto History project.
In the end events have been clocked for all but two days of this month. Hopefully the missing days will be filled by the time February comes round again.
Now on to March which is a bit thin on the ground so far but there are three good events waiting for the opening day.
Overall coverage has now reached 60% of days across the year with 366 events gathered in total.
Now targeting the two-thirds point - should hit that in the next few days.
Goodbye to February, looking forward to March.
Thank you
Pennsif
[ graphic made by @pennsif ]
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