Almost 10 years after being hacked, the Mt. Gox crypto exchange appears to be starting to repay customers who lost 850,000 bitcoin [BTC] now valued around $36 billion.

Some participants in the mtgoxinsolvency subreddit group said they had received payouts in yen over Paypal. Others, who’d chosen to receive cash into bank accounts, said they had not seen any inflows.

The exchange, launched in 2010, was the world's biggest when it was hacked in 2014. It was ultimately able to recover about 20% of the stolen funds. Earlier this year, it extended the deadline for repayments by 12 months until October 2024.

The repayment could have some impact on bitcoin prices, due to the sheer volume of the tokens being released, but would not destablize the market, UBS had said in a report earlier this year.

Mt. Gox Bankruptcy Hacks

Sheldon Reback

Sheldon Reback is CoinDesk's European news editor. Before joining the company, he spent 26 years as an editor at Bloomberg News, where he worked on beats as diverse as stock markets and the retail industry as well as covering the dot-com bubble of 2000-2002. He subsequently managed the Bloomberg Terminal's main news page before becoming the European editor for a global project to produce short, chart-based stories across the newsroom. His previous work as a journalist took him to Hong Kong, where he reported and edited for several technology magazines, and he also has experience in market research and writing computer manuals. Sheldon has an MBA from the London Business School and an industrial chemistry degree from Brunel University. He owns a small amount of ether.