Mt. Gox Pushes Repayment Deadline to 2027 With $2.8B in Bitcoin Still to Distribute

Mt. Gox's rehabilitation trustee has pushed back the deadline for repaying creditors of the defunct crypto exchange by another year, to October 31, 2027, according to a notice dated Friday.

Trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi said the base, early lump-sum and intermediate repayments have largely been completed for creditors who finished the necessary procedures and did not run into problems along the way.

But "many rehabilitation creditors still have not received their Repayments because they have not completed the necessary procedures for receiving Repayments," Kobayashi wrote, and a "considerable number" have not been paid because of issues during the process. The court approved the change to the deadline, which had been set for October 31 this year.

It is the fourth time the deadline has been pushed back by a year. The trustee first moved it from October 2023 to October 2024, then to October 2025, and last October to October 2026, citing the same incomplete procedures and processing issues. By then, around 19,500 creditors had received funds.

Wallets linked to Mt. Gox still hold about 34,388 BTC, worth roughly $2.8 billion, according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham.

Arkham's data shows no transfers from the estate since June, when it shifted 10,422.65 BTC, then worth more than $739 million, from cold storage, mostly to a new wallet. That transfer did not show a sale or a new round of repayments.

A decade-long wait

Mt. Gox was once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, before its 2014 collapse, when roughly 850,000 BTC went missing. A Tokyo court approved its civil rehabilitation plan in 2021, clearing the way for the return of roughly $9 billion in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to an estimated 24,000 creditors through registered exchanges.

The repayments once rattled the market. When the trustee said in June 2024 that distributions would begin that July, Bitcoin fell as low as $61,060, down 6.5% in a day, as traders braced for creditors to sell. Mt. Gox's wallets held about 141,686 BTC at the time. Later delays drew little reaction, and an extension in October 2024 briefly lifted the price by keeping potential supply off the market.

Observers now see the remaining coins as a smaller risk. The amount is "small relative to the liquidity and trading volumes in today's Bitcoin market," Markus Levin, co-founder of decentralized data network XYO, told Decrypt in June. "At this point it's more of a recurring headline than a real source of downside pressure."