Mt. Gox Payout Unlikely to Destabilise Bitcoin Price: Investment Bank Analyst
- Written by: Sam Coventry
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Fears of a surge in Bitcoin supply as creditors to defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox are likely to prove unfounded, according to an analysis from a major investment bank.
UBS says a recent decision by one of the main creditors to the exchange to take payment in Bitcoin should drastically limit the potential increase in supply, which could have otherwise driven the value of the coin lower.
Mt Gox Investment Fund has opted for an early payout in September 2023, according to Bloomberg.
The fund will receive 90% of what's collectable, according to the report.
But because the creditor is choosing to receive Bitcoin the supply of new coins to the market will be limited.
"New supply could still come to the market, but this at least implies it would be less concentrated. It's certainly difficult to estimate the extent to which the market has been pricing massive sales coming from Mt.Gox. However, we think such news could have been additional factor for — what we believe could be mainly retail-led — BTC's surprising resilience of late," says analyst Ivan Kachkovski at UBS.
Prior to its collapse in 2014 Mt. Gox was the world's largest centralised crypto exchange,
The exchange suffered a hack that resulted in the loss of 850k bitcoin, which at the time was valued at half a billion dollars.
Today, it is worth 20.5BN USD.
Mt. Gox has recovered 142k bitcoin, 143k Bitcoin Cash and 69BN Yen, which amounts to around 20% of the total hack.