Mt. Gox shifts $2.5B in Bitcoin to unknown wallet, repayments top 40%

Defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox transferred 37,477 Bitcoin worth $2.5 billion at current prices to an unknown wallet address. 

According to data from blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence, Mt. Gox transferred the 37,477 BTC to a new address at 4:53 am UTC on July 24.

Of that sum, 5,106 BTC were sent through again to a separate cold wallet owned by Mt. Gox.

The move comes less than 24 hours after the exchange shifted $2.8 billion in BTC to several wallets on July 22, with $340 million being sent to four wallets associated with the crypto exchange Bitstamp.

Bitstamp is one of the five exchanges working with the Mt. Gox trustee to return funds to creditors.

As of the time of publication, just over 40% of the Bitcoin owed to Mt. Gox creditors has been distributed, according to data from CryptoQuant. This means that 60%, or around $5.6 billion, is yet to be returned to creditors.

How bad are Mt. Gox repayments for Bitcoin?

Around $9 billion worth of Bitcoin is owed to around 127,000 Mt. Gox creditors, who have been waiting for more than 10 years to recover their funds after the exchange collapsed following a major security exploit in 2014.

Related: Mt. Gox prepares for repayments on Bitstamp, executes test transactions

While some see it as a potential mass sell-off event, several analysts have suggested the fears are largely overblown.

Galaxy Digital’s head of research, Alex Thorne, said that over half of the Bitcoin repaid to creditors is owed to various funds and will not be hitting the spot market directly.

Thorn added that even the funds paid back directly to individual creditors aren’t likely to hit the market all at once, saying it’s probable many Mt. Gox creditors are more “diamond-handed” than some may think.

Other market commentators told Cointelegraph on July 15 that they believed that much of Mt. Gox’s potential impact on Bitcoin was already “priced in” and that the worst of Bitcoin’s price action was firmly in the rearview mirror.

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