Case record · 29 August 2026
Mt. Gox and the Pattern Behind Early Exchange Failures
The Mt. Gox collapse is usually retold as a theft, and the figure that survives from it is 850,000 bitcoins. The court record supports a narrower and more uncomfortable reading, in which the security failure sits on top of an accounting failure that the industry took much longer to address.
The Filing of 28 February 2014
The primary document is short. Signed by Mark Karpeles as representative director, it records an application for commencement of civil rehabilitation, the Japanese minji saisei procedure, filed at the Tokyo District Court and accepted the same day under case number 2014 (sai) 12. The company was placed under a preservative order, a supervisory order, and a comprehensive prohibition of forced attachment. Baker & McKenzie and Yodoyabashi & Yamagami acted as counsel, with Nobuaki Kobayashi of Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu appointed supervisor and investigator.
The balance sheet in that filing gives total assets of 3,841,866,163 yen against total current liabilities of 6,501,119,371. The stated cause is compressed into a single sentence: at the start of February 2014, illegal access through the abuse of a bug in the bitcoin system resulted in an increase in incomplete bitcoin transfer transactions. Approximately 750,000 bitcoins deposited by users and approximately 100,000 belonging to the company had disappeared. A separate cash discrepancy of approximately 2.8 billion yen was found on the 24th, and the site closed at noon on the 25th.
Read in sequence, the discrepancy on the 24th, the shutdown at noon on the 25th and the court filing on the 28th occupy four days between them. The trading that preceded them ran for years. That compression is the first sign that the loss was not detected as it happened.
The Wallet Nobody Had Looked In Since 2011
Three weeks after the filing, a second announcement corrected the arithmetic in a way that is rarely retold. Following the rehabilitation application, old-format wallets used prior to June 2011 were rescanned. On 7 March 2014, one of them was found to hold approximately 200,000 BTC, given precisely in the document as 199,999.99. Counsel were informed, a hearing followed on the 8th, and the court and the supervisor were notified on the 10th.
Together with roughly 2,000 BTC already known before the application, the company then held about 202,000 BTC. The loss figure was restated from approximately 850,000 down to approximately 650,000, with the announcement adding that the numbers may still change depending on the results of the investigation. That caveat has never been retired.
The coins were not stolen and recovered. They sat in a wallet format the company had stopped using in June 2011 and evidently assumed was empty, and they surfaced only because a court application forced a rescan of everything. Roughly a quarter of what had been declared missing was in fact sitting in the company's own custody, unnoticed, for close to three years. An operator that cannot enumerate its own holdings without an insolvency filing to compel it does not know its balance sheet, and that is a bookkeeping failure with no cryptographic component at all. European contemporaries such as BitMarket.eu traded at a fraction of that volume and nothing comparable is recorded against them, but the absence of any external check on what an exchange held applied right across the sector.
Ten Years of Procedure
What followed is documented step by step on the trustee's own page, which is still maintained and written in the first person. The rehabilitation route the company applied for in February did not survive the spring: the application was dismissed on 16 April 2014, provisional administration was ordered the same day, and a written decision of bankruptcy followed on the 24th.
The Mt. Gox proceeding on the trustee's own record
| Date | Step | Consequence on the record |
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| 2014-02-28 | Civil rehabilitation applied for, accepted the same day | Preservative and supervisory orders imposed; forced attachment prohibited from 4 March |
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| 2014-04-16 | Application dismissed, provisional administration ordered | The rehabilitation route closes |
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| 2014-04-24 | Written decision of bankruptcy | Commencement of bankruptcy announced on 21 May |
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| 2018-06-22 | Civil rehabilitation commenced at 5:00 p.m. | The ongoing bankruptcy proceedings are stayed |
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| 2021-11-16 | Confirmation order becomes final and binding | The plan approved by creditors on 20 October binds them |
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| 2024-06-24 | Repayments in BTC and BCH commence | Distributions begin, ten years after the filing |
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| 2025-10-27 | Deadline notice issued | Repayment deadline moves to 31 October 2026 |
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The reversal in June 2018 is the part worth marking. A bankruptcy already under way was stayed so that a civil rehabilitation could commence, under a second and different case number, 2017 (sai) no. 35. Two proceedings, two numbers, one company. The plan was amended twice more, per decisions of 28 October 2022 and 8 June 2023, before any distribution reached anyone. What becomes of customer funds after an exchange collapse is decided in exactly this machinery rather than in the exchange's terms of service.
Questions About the Case
Why did early bitcoin exchanges fail?
The Mt. Gox record points at bookkeeping rather than at cryptography. An operator that could not enumerate its own holdings without a court application to compel it had no reliable picture of what it held, and a shortfall of that size accumulates unnoticed only where the reconciliation is not being done.
How much bitcoin did Mt. Gox actually lose?
The February 2014 filing gave approximately 750,000 bitcoins deposited by users plus approximately 100,000 belonging to the company. After roughly 202,000 BTC were located in March, the figure was revised to approximately 650,000 BTC, with the announcement noting the numbers may still change depending on the investigation.
What the Record Still Does Not Say
Twelve years in, the proceeding has reached the point where its own deadline has stopped carrying information. The repayment deadline has moved three times on the trustee's page, from 31 October 2023 to 31 October 2024, then to 31 October 2025, then to 31 October 2026. Repayments in bitcoin and bitcoin cash did begin on 24 June 2024, so distributions are real rather than theoretical, but the end date keeps receding ahead of them.
No reason accompanies any of the three moves. The page states the new date and nothing else, and there is no public account of how much remains undistributed or how many creditors are still waiting. Anyone reconstructing this case from primary material reaches that wall quickly, and the honest thing is to stop there rather than fill it in from commentary. The notice carrying the current date was posted on 27 October 2025.