Mt Gox Trustee Has Sold $230 Million in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash Since March

The trustee for the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox has revealed new details about the pace of cryptocurrency sales as part of the firm's bankruptcy and rehabilitation process.

Attorney Nobuaki Kobayashi explained in a September 25 notice on the Mt. Gox website that over $230 million dollar's worth of bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH) had been exchanged for fiat currency between March 18 and the start of civil rehabilitation on June 22.

According to the notice, the trustee sold 24,658.00762 BTC and 25,331.00761 BCH – quantities that brought in 25,975,702,352 Japanese yen, or $230,269,821.82.

Following the sale, the balance in the trustee account was "approximately JPY 70,059 million," or around $621 million, Kobayashi added.

In the notice, the trustee also explained that a trust has been set up to preserve funds in fiat for bankruptcy creditors of the exchange.

Explaining the move to sell off the cryptos before the civil rehabilitation was initiated, Kobayashi wrote it was "necessary and appropriate to procure a suitable amount of money to secure the interests [of] the creditors for the principal amount and delay damages of the determined and undetermined bankruptcy claims" before the trust was set up.

While some creditors had applied for fiat refunds from the remaining holdings of Mt. Gox, others had requested to have their balances in cryptocurrency returned, since the values of BTC and BCH have climbed far above the levels seen at the time of the exchange's closure in 2014.

While likely good news for creditors seeking to be repaid in fiat, the sell-offs haven't been welcomed by some quarters of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Indeed, some have argued that the Gox trustee sales are partially behind the bear market seen across cryptocurrencies since the start of the year.

Back in March, CoinDesk reported that $400 million in BTC and BCH had been sold off in the preceding months by the Gox trustee, with Kobayashi stressing that the process was being carried out in a way that would not negatively impact the market.

Japanese yen image via Shutterstock