Mt. Gox was the biggest bitcoin exchange in the world until February 2014, when it froze withdrawals, went offline and filed for bankruptcy with about 850,000 bitcoin missing. It never reopened.
Most of its customers have since been paid back. A court-supervised rehabilitation started repaying creditors in bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in July 2024, and about 19,500 had been paid by 2025. The deadline for the rest is now October 31, 2027.
Below is the full story: how a card-trading site became the world's main bitcoin market, how it was drained, where the stolen coins went, and what you can still do if you had an account.
The Founding of Mt. Gox
The website began not as a crypto trading platform, but as a way for fans of the card game Magic: The Gathering to trade cards with each other. Founder Jed McCaleb bought the domain name www.mtgox.com and intended to create a website called "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange" (hence MTGOX).
Here's what it looked like in August 2007:
However, McCaleb abandoned the project after three months and moved on to other things. In 2009, he used the site for a new game he created called Far Wilds:
In 2010, McCaleb first read about bitcoin and realized that an exchange was needed to match buyers and sellers. So he turned his website into the crypto exchange that would soon dominate the bitcoin world. Here's what an early version looked like:
In 2011, McCaleb sold the site to Mark Karpeles, a French developer living in Japan. Within two years it was the largest bitcoin exchange in the world.
Even after selling the site, McCaleb wasn't done with cryptocurrency. Working alongside Arthur Britto, David Schwartz and Ryan Fugger, he helped create Ripple, and in 2014 he co-founded Stellar, an open-source blockchain payment network.
Hacks, Breaches, and More Hacks
Before we get to Mark Karpeles running Mt. Gox, we need to back up to a few months before McCaleb sold the site. This sets the stage for many of the problems that followed.
According to a lawsuit filed against McCaleb, at least two security breaches occurred in early 2011, leading to a significant amount of bitcoin being stolen from users.
The lawsuit alleges that McCaleb didn't refund users, announce the hack to the public, or fix the security problems. Instead, he simply sold the site and moved on.
McCaleb vigorously denies this, saying:
The idea that I was somehow to blame for the demise of Mt. Gox, three whole years after I had anything to do with the site, is completely ridiculous. The amount missing when Mark took over was relatively minor and he was fully aware of it.
Either way, the problems didn't stop there. On June 13, 2011, the site announced that 478 accounts had 25,000 bitcoin stolen from them. Two days later, a hacker calling himself cRazIeStinGeR announced that he had the entire user database for sale, usernames and passwords included. Still the company didn't act.
The very next day, a flurry of unusual trading began, and the price of bitcoin on the exchange crashed from a high of $17 to $0.01 per coin. Later that day, someone released the database of usernames and passwords, compromising all 61,016 accounts. The company also confirmed that 2,000 bitcoin were stolen that day.
In response, Karpeles shut the site down for a week and disclosed the breach to users. The company also worked to refund and roll back fraudulent transactions. For the time being, things stabilized.
But the problems were really just beginning.
The Collapse
No single event doomed Mt. Gox. It was a run of them. In early May 2013, CoinLab filed a $75 million lawsuit against the company. The two had partnered in February of that year, with CoinLab agreeing to handle all North American customers. The lawsuit alleged that Mt. Gox never let CoinLab take those customers over.
Things went from bad to worse. On May 15, 2013, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a warrant against the company's U.S. subsidiary account, because Mt. Gox wasn't a licensed money transmitter in the United States. The government seized $5 million, and the company temporarily halted withdrawals in U.S. dollars.
In August of that year, the company released a press statement admitting it had "incurred significant losses" by crediting accounts before the money had actually arrived from its bank.
The site kept stumbling. In November 2013, Wired noted that customers were waiting weeks, even months, for withdrawals.
February 2014 was the end of Mt. Gox.
On February 7, the site halted all withdrawals, citing a software bug it needed to fix. For the next two weeks, Karpeles gave no indication of when users might be able to withdraw their funds.
On February 24, all trading was suspended. Hours later, the site itself went offline.
When the company filed for bankruptcy protection, it announced that nearly 750,000 customer bitcoins and 100,000 of its own were gone. (Karpeles later said he had found 200,000 of the missing bitcoin in an old-format wallet.) The company blamed hackers for the rest.
Years of legal proceedings followed, both the bankruptcy itself and lawsuits from customers. In 2015, Karpeles was arrested by Japanese police and charged with embezzlement and manipulating accounts.
In May 2016, Mt. Gox creditors filed claims totaling $2.4 trillion, while the firm overseeing the bankruptcy said only $91 million in assets was available to cover them.
In 2019, Karpeles was convicted of tampering with financial records and given a suspended sentence of two and a half years. He was cleared of embezzlement.
Where the Stolen Bitcoin Went
For years, nobody outside the company knew how the coins had left. Independent researchers at WizSec traced much of it to a theft of Mt. Gox's wallet keys that began in 2011, which the exchange hadn't noticed.
In June 2023, the U.S. Justice Department charged two Russian nationals, Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, with stealing and laundering about 647,000 bitcoin from Mt. Gox. Bilyuchenko was also charged with running the BTC-e exchange alongside Alexander Vinnik, and much of the stolen bitcoin passed through BTC-e. We cover that side of the story in what happened to BTC-e.
One pile from the 2011 theft has never moved: 79,956 bitcoin sitting at a single address beginning "1Feex". In February 2026, Karpeles proposed a change to Bitcoin's rules that would let the Mt. Gox trustee move those coins to creditors without the private key. His pull request was closed within hours, and both Bitcoin developers and Mt. Gox creditors rejected the idea: rewriting who owns which coins is exactly what Bitcoin is designed to prevent. Those coins aren't part of the repayments.
The Repayments
The bankruptcy turned into a civil rehabilitation, which let creditors be repaid partly in bitcoin instead of only at 2014 yen values. The Tokyo District Court's rehabilitation plan became final and binding on November 16, 2021.
Payments came in stages:
- Late 2023: the first cash repayments in Japanese yen, some of them paid through PayPal.
- July 5, 2024: bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash repayments began, sent through exchanges the trustee designated, including Kraken, Bitstamp, BitGo, Bitbank and SBI VC Trade. Creditors received their coins in their accounts there.
- Since then: most creditors who completed the paperwork have been paid, about 19,500 of them by 2025.
The deadline for the remaining repayments has moved four times since the original October 2023 date. On October 16, 2026, the trustee moved it again, from October 31, 2026 to October 31, 2027. The trustee's reason: many creditors still haven't completed the steps needed to get paid, and a considerable number ran into problems along the way. Wallets linked to Mt. Gox still hold about 34,400 bitcoin.
Because bitcoin's price is so much higher than in 2014, creditors repaid in bitcoin got back far more in dollar terms than their accounts were worth when Mt. Gox closed, even though they recovered only part of the coins they lost.
Can You Still Get Your Bitcoin Back From Mt. Gox?
It depends on whether you filed a claim.
If you filed a claim before the October 22, 2018 deadline, you're in the repayment process. If you haven't been paid, log in to the trustee's official claims site and check whether anything is still pending, such as choosing a repayment method or confirming your exchange account. The trustee says unfinished procedures are the main reason creditors are still waiting.
If you never filed a claim, there's no way to join now. The filing deadline passed in 2018. The mtgoxinsolvency subreddit's FAQ explains the details, including the "zombie" claims WizSec wrote about.
Watch out for scams either way. The trustee has warned creditors several times, in March 2025 and again in October 2025, about fake emails and websites that copy the Mt. Gox name and logo to collect personal details. Only use the official claims site, don't reply to emails asking for your information, and be wary of anyone who offers to speed up your repayment, buy your claim or "recover" Mt. Gox funds for a fee. If you've already sent money or details to someone like that, our crypto scam recovery checklist covers what to do next.
We can't help with Mt. Gox claims. Crypto Asset Recovery recovers passwords and recovery phrases for wallets you control. We don't recover money held by a failed exchange.
Did You Withdraw Bitcoin From Mt. Gox?
Plenty of early bitcoiners bought on Mt. Gox and moved their coins off it before 2014. Coins you withdrew to your own wallet were never part of the bankruptcy. If that wallet still exists, the bitcoin is still in it.
The usual problem is getting back in. A desktop wallet from 2011 to 2013 was most likely Bitcoin-Qt (now Bitcoin Core), MultiBit or an early Blockchain.info wallet. Some people printed a paper wallet. If you're not sure which you used, start with how to figure out where you created your bitcoin wallet.
If you have the wallet file but not its password, that's what we do. Crypto Asset Recovery works from your encrypted wallet file and your best password guesses, and the cracking runs on offline, air-gapped machines. You only pay if we succeed. Start your recovery →
Frequently asked questions
Did Mt. Gox creditors get their bitcoin back? Most did, in part. Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash repayments started on July 5, 2024, and about 19,500 creditors had been paid by 2025. Creditors got back only part of the coins they lost, but at today's prices that is worth far more than their 2014 balances.
Can I still file a Mt. Gox claim? No. The claim filing deadline was October 22, 2018. If you filed in time but haven't been paid, check the official claims site for unfinished steps before the current October 31, 2027 deadline.
How much bitcoin does Mt. Gox still have? Wallets linked to Mt. Gox held about 34,400 bitcoin when the trustee extended the deadline in October 2026. That's separate from the 79,956 stolen bitcoin still sitting at the "1Feex" address, which the trustee can't move.
Is an email about my Mt. Gox repayment real? Treat it with suspicion. The trustee has warned that fake emails and websites are impersonating Mt. Gox to collect creditors' details. Don't click links in the email; go to the official claims site directly and check there.
What happened to Mark Karpeles? A Tokyo court convicted him in 2019 of tampering with financial records and gave him a suspended sentence of two and a half years, clearing him of embezzlement. In February 2026 he proposed a Bitcoin rule change to return the 79,956 stolen "1Feex" coins to creditors. Developers and creditors rejected it.
