NEWS Annaliese Milano
Apr 26, 2018 at 16:00 UTC | Updated Apr 26, 2018 at 17:38 UTC
16,000 bitcoins (an amount worth about $141 million) tied to the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt Gox were moved on Thursday.
According to CryptoGround, which monitors Mt Gox's remaining wallets, the bitcoins were removed from four separate addresses in increments of approximately 2,000, with 0 BTC remaining in each wallet that the funds were extracted from.
The wallets are under control of the exchange's bankruptcy trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, a Tokyo lawyer who also revealed in March that he had sold about $400 million of Mt Gox bitcoin and bitcoin cash in September of 2017. At present, the Gox addresses still hold roughly 146,106 BTC, blockchain data shows. Additional network data indicates that trustee holdings of bitcoin cash are on the move, with 16,000 BCH being sent over the course of four transactions.
Kobayashi is tasked with liquidating the tokens on behalf of Mt Gox creditors, most of whom have not recovered their funds after the exchange closed its trading operations in 2014. Yet the process hasn't been without controversy, given that the value of the bitcoins held by Mt Gox exceeds the amount claimed by the exchange's creditors.
Founded in 2010, the exchange boasted around 80 percent of global trading volume at its height. Since Mt Gox's closure, the exchange and its founder, Mark Karpeles, have been embroiled in legal battles, including class action lawsuits and embezzlement charges.
As CoinDesk previously reported, past sell-offs from the wallets have coincided with steep declines across the cryptocurrency market. Notably, a transfer of funds on February 5 was concurrent with a 50 percent decline in market value from January's all-time market capitalization high of $830 billion. Miniature people with bitcoins image via Shutterstock
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