BTC price drops $2,000 as Mt. Gox moves $2.8 billion in Bitcoin

On July 16, Mt. Gox began transferring BTC as it prepared to pay back customers who lost assets in the devastating exchange hack a decade ago.

According to Arkham Intelligence, a wallet linked to Mt. Gox moved 0.021 BTC to another address. Colin Wu, industry watcher suggested that this could be evidence of transfer.

Mt. Gox moves Bitcoin

However, about an hour later, there was a much larger transfer of 44,000 BTC worth about $2.8 billion to an address in Mt. Gox Cold Wallet.

The wallet Mt. Gox still has about 139,000 BTC worth about $8.8 billion at current market prices.

Mt. Gox moved 44,527 $BTC(2.84B) to an internal wallet 5 minutes ago, which may be preparing for redemption.#MtGox it currently has 138,985 $BTC($8.87 million).https://t.co/f2q66eQNuk pic.twitter.com/JlqkZdzkPC

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) July 16, 2024

Crypto markets have just recovered from the selling pressure induced by the German government dumping its BTC stash; now they have to fight a bigger whale.

At the end of June, the rehabilitation trustee of Mt. Gox issued a letter about the repayments to creditors, saying they would begin in July. At the time, BTC was down 4.6% on the news.

The exchange, one of the world’s first BTC markets, became insolvent after a devastating hack that led to the theft of 850,000 BTC valued at around $460 million at the time of the incident in 2014.

It is likely that the potential sale of billions of dollars of BTC from Mt. Gox put further pressure on the markets, which have returned to the green over the past few days.

Market reaction

Bitcoin prices had already started to pull back in response to the massive asset movement. The asset hit an intraday and near four-week high of $65,000 in Asian trading on Tuesday.

However, it has pulled back sharply in recent hours, falling 3% below $63,000. At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $62,957, which is still up 10% from the same time last week.

Analyst ‘Rekt Capital’ declared that Bitcoin’s downtrend ended on July 15, however, that statement may have been premature in light of this latest development and there may be some more pain ahead.

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