What Was Mt. Gox? History, Hack & Repayment Status

Introduction If you’ve searched for “mt gox” recently, it’s probably because the name showed up in a headline again — more than a decade after the exchange collapsed, a dormant wallet linked to it still makes news whenever it moves Bitcoin.

To understand why that keeps happening, it helps to know what Mt. Gox actually was, how it fell apart in 2014, and why a bankruptcy case from over a decade ago is still, in a very real sense, unfinished business for the Bitcoin market. What Was Mt. Gox? Mt.

Gox was a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange that, at its peak, handled more than 70% of all Bitcoin transactions worldwide, according to Investopedia’s sourced history of the exchange.

The name is an acronym for “Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange” — the site was originally created by Jed McCaleb as a place for players to trade cards from the collectible card game before it was repurposed into a Bitcoin exchange.