Key Takeaways
- A Bitcoin wallet linked to the dead BTC-e exchange came to life on November 23.
- Crypto wallet linked to the MT Gox hack started moving 10,000 Bitcoin to various exchanges and personal wallets.
BTC-e, an infamous crypto exchange, has been awakened from the dead after seven years as a crypto wallet linked to the famous MT Gox hack started moving 10,000 Bitcoin to various exchanges and personal wallets.
3,500 BTC were moved to several wallets, while the remaining 6,500 BTC were moved to a single address. Of the total amount sent, 9,950 BTC is reported to be located in personal wallets, while the rest of the funds was moved through intermediaries and is now at four deposit addresses in two exchanges.
According to Blockchain analytics company Cryptoquant co-founder and CEO Ki Young Ju, 0.6% of the funds were sent to exchanges and may even represent sell-side liquidity. In his tweet, Young added that 65 BTC had been transferred to the crypto exchange HitBTC. He also urged the exchange to suspend the account for suspicious activity.
BTC-e, one of the oldest digital currency exchanges, had its website shut down and funds/assets seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2017 over a series of allegedly criminal acts, including money laundering by the site and its owner. As per Chainalysis, at the time of its shutdown, BTC-e still held “a substantial amount of Bitcoin,” and in April 2018, moved more than 30,000 BTC out of its service wallet.
Mt. Gox was a leading Tokyo-based crypto exchange that operated between 2010 and 2014. It was responsible for over 70% of Bitcoin transactions at its peak. In February 2014, Mt. Gox suspended trading, shut down its website, and filed for bankruptcy protection after losing around 850,000 Bitcoin in a hack.
Analytics firm Chainalysis in a recent report, has compared the collapse of FTX to that of Mt Gox. As per Chainalysis’ research lead Eric Jardine, the market share of Mt. Gox averaged 46% of all exchange inflows in the year leading up to its collapse in 2014, compared to FTX’s average of 13%, which operated between 2019 and 2022. Chainlaysis further added that there exists no reason for FTX to bounce from this bankruptcy crisis since the crypto industry has survived worse than the fall of FTX.
