Mt. Gox, which at one point was the world's largest online Bitcoin exchange, has now apparently decided to cash out, literally. The Wall Street Journal reports, via unnamed sources, that the company has asked a court in its home city of Tokyo for permission to file for liquidation.
The report says that the current management of Mt. Gox, which filed for bankruptcy protection in late February, has found that holding meetings with its many creditors around the world was just too difficult. More importantly, there are no feasible plans to get the exchange out of bankruptcy. The Tokyo court will still have to approve the liquidation plan, and if that happens a trustee will be appointed to take over Mt. Gox and its remaining assets from its CEO Mark Karpelès.
When it filed for bankruptcy, Mt. Gox claimed that hackers had made false withdrawals from the online exchange that caused 750,000 Bitcoins to be taken from its customers, along with 100,000 of its own. The management of the exchange knew about the missing Bitcoins months beforehand but continued to trade in the controversial online currency until it finally shut down on January 25th. Since Mt. Gox entered bankruptcy, 200,000 of the lost Bitcoins have been recovered.
Source: Wall Street Journal | Image via Mt. Gox
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