Mt. Gox customers hold placards while protesting outside a building housing the headquarters of Mt. Gox and its parent company Tibanne Co. in Tokyo. Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg
Mt. Gox, once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, filed for bankruptcy in Japan, and said that 850,000 Bitcoins belonging to its customers and the firm were missing.
“The company believes there is a high possibility that the Bitcoins were stolen,” Mt. Gox said in a statement. “It is considering filing a criminal complaint.”
The filing follows three weeks of speculation about the fate of the Tokyo-based exchange, which suspended withdrawals on Feb. 7. The turmoil left investors and entrepreneurs asking how the insolvency could happen, and how the fledgling Bitcoin industry can bounce back.
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“Mt.Gox is the only exchange that wasn’t backed by venture funds or institutional investors,” Mickey Malka, the founder of Palo Alto, California-based Ribbit Capital and a Bitcoin investor, said in an interview. “It will take time for the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem to prove that this is a bad apple and not a problem of the entire ecosystem.”
The price of Bitcoin was down almost 3 percent to $560.89 at 10:48 New York time, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index.
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