Mt. Gox Legal Head Steps Down Citing BTC Payouts Could Take Years

Mt. Gox has been an infamous exchange for many years now and the head of the biggest organised creditor group representing the former users of the failed exchange is stepping down amid what he described as a protracted legal medium that could take years to fully resolve.

The founder and coordinator of the legal side to Mt. Gox, Andy Pag sat down with CoinDesk in an interview to explain that he now believes the ongoing legal problems might hold up the crypto exchange’s civil rehabilitation process for up to two more years.

Mt. Gox Legal started around 18 months ago by Pag with the aim to advocate for the reimbursement of creditors. Last week, he first showed his opinion of the expected timeline in a private forum post which told creditors he would be stepping down from his role as the coordinator at the end of April.

At one point, Mt. Gox was the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world but in 2014 it filed for bankruptcy after its operators found that 850,000 Bitcoins had been stolen from its wallets. Some of the funds were recovered but the majority are still out there in the hands of some hacker, never to be seen again.

Due to a huge increase in price between 2014 and 2017, the crypto exchange went from a bankruptcy proceeding to a civil rehabilitation process that is still ongoing to this day.

Coinlab

Coinlab came into a partnership with the exchange in 2012 to act as the exchange’s US branch. In 2013, they sued Mt. Gox, claiming that the exchange had failed to honour the agreement and asking for $75 million.

Rather than waiting for a court system to decide whether this claim is legit or not, Pag said that he intends to sell his claim and step down from Mt. Gox legal and move on with his life.

He has said, “I’ve put my career on hold for 18 months and… It’s just a big regret that we’ve kind of been outplayed by other parties. In 2014 I had this money sitting there and it was this great big windfall and it was amazing and I had all these plans that I was going to put into place with it. It’s not losing the money that stung, it’s losing those plans and not being able to doing those things I wanted to do, and there’s a bit of a repeat here.”