In a note made public on Thursday, attorney-at-law Nobuaki Kobayashi announced on behalf of disgraced bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox that “At 5 p.m. on April 24, 2014, the Tokyo District Court issued an order of commencement of
the bankruptcy proceedings for MtGox”.
Kobayashi has been appointed as the bankruptcy trustee and will be responsible to administer and dispose company assets.
The move comes following the company’s initial plan to carry through with civil rehabilitation, which was canceled due to complexities in communicating with the exchange’s numerous creditors around the world.
This is just the beginning of a whole new chapter in the end of Mt. Gox, and Kobayashi expects there to be no shortage of questions from the public on the matter.
The company’s announcement included an in-depth ‘frequently asked questions’ section that reveals that a creditors’ meeting will be held on the 23rd of July, among other things.
The company notes that further updates on the situation will be published on their website, and asks for the patience of all involved.
But for some creditors, patience ran out weeks ago.
Mt. Gox consistently kept users in the dark, at some point halting account withdrawals and trading, and eventually dropped a bombshell on investors by announcing that most of the money they were in charge of protecting had gone missing.
The losses are pegged at hundreds of millions of dollars (and hundreds of thousands of bitcoins), by company estimates.
CEO Mark Karpeles appeared before Japanese media in late February to apologize for the company’s negligence, but the damage had long been done.
Mt. Gox stands as the best example of how a digital currency exchange should not be run.
We’ll keep you updated as more information on this becomes available.