Bitcoin Falls as Mt. Gox Repayment Roils Crypto Market
Prices for major cryptocurrencies, as well as shares of Coinbase Global (COIN) and MicroStrategy (MSTR), slumped Friday as collapsed crypto site Mt. Gox began paying back creditors.
Nobuaki Kobayashi, the trustee for the Mt. Gox bankruptcy estate, said that the estate “made repayments in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to some of the rehabilitation creditors through a part of the Designated Cryptocurrency Exchanges etc. in accordance with the Rehabilitation Plan.”
He noted that other creditors would be “promptly” repaid when certain conditions were met, among them that they can be made “safely and securely.”
Bitcoin (BTCUSD) was trading around $55,700, down roughly 2.4%, as of 10:45 a.m. ET Friday. Ether was off about 3.4%.
Mt. Gox was once the world’s biggest crypto exchange, at one point handling 70% of bitcoin transactions. A hack attack in 2014, which resulted in the loss of an estimated 740,000 bitcoin, led to the firm’s demise.
The anticipation of the Mt. Gox news, which Kobayashi signaled last month would happen in July, had already begun to roil the crypto market. Today’s announcement sent bitcoin to its lowest level in five months.
The impact has also been felt at Coinbase, which reported it had $935 million in revenue from customer crypto trading in the first quarter, double what it was in the fourth quarter.MicroStrategy said in its first-quarter financial report that it owned 214,400 bitcoin.
Coinbase shares were down about 5% to $213.87 as of 10:45 a.m. ET Friday, while MicroStrategy fell more than 6% to $1,220.11. Still, shares of Coinbase and MicroStrategy have surged about 23% and 93% year-to-date.
