Creditors of Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange to vote on draft refund plan

The trustee of hacked, now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox has posted another update on the long-running process of refunding the exchange clients.

Nobuaki Kobayashi, a Tokyo attorney appointed to act as civil rehabilitation trustee to manage Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy estate funds, announced Thursday that the Tokyo District Court ordered that “There were no grounds for disapproving the draft rehabilitation plan.” As previously reported, the plan was filed on Dec. 15, 2020.

According to the announcement, the court has approved a repayment process schedule that includes a vote by creditors on the proposed refund plan. As part of the process, the trustee will initially determine the creditors with voting rights on March 24. Following the voting deadline on Oct. 8, creditors will attend a meeting on the resolution of the compensation plan on Oct. 20.

Creditors will have three options to proceed with the voting on the draft compensation plan, including online voting, written voting, and voting in person on the day of the creditor meeting. Select creditors will be asked to choose one of these methods, Kobayashi wrote.

Founded in 2010, Mt. Gox was once the world’s largest Bitcoin (BTC) exchange, reportedly handling up to 80% of global BTC trading volumes. The crypto exchange suffered a series of devastating hacks, losing a total of 1.35 million BTC in two incidents in 2011 and 2014.

Following the second hack, Kobayashi was appointed to oversee the civil reimbursement process to reportedly compensate the 24,000 victims of the Mt. Gox hack. According to reports, there is around $630 million and 150,000 BTC in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trust waiting to be distributed to their rightful owners. Despite the reimbursement operation being initiated years ago, creditors still haven’t been paid back, following multiple delays.