Bitcoin's Tokyo Whale Sold $400 Million and He's Not Done
Nobuaki Kobayashi has become a force to be reckoned with in the cryptocurrency world.
(Bloomberg) -- He’s not your typical Bitcoin whale, but Nobuaki Kobayashi has become a force to be reckoned with in the cryptocurrency world.
The Tokyo attorney and bankruptcy trustee for the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange disclosed on Wednesday that he sold about $400 million of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash since late September. Kobayashi, who’s liquidating the tokens on behalf of Mt. Gox creditors, has another $1.9 billion to offload.
Once the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection four years ago after disclosing that it lost 850,000 Bitcoins, then worth about $500 million. The company, which later said it recovered about 200,000 Bitcoins, blamed hackers for the loss.
While Kobayashi didn’t provide details of his strategy for selling the coins, he said he tried to get “as high a price as possible.” Disclosures in his report on the Mt. Gox website suggest his Bitcoin sales since September fetched the equivalent of $10,105 on average. The cryptocurrency was trading at $10,031 as of 6:45 a.m. Hong Kong time on Thursday.
To contact the reporter on this story: Go Onomitsu in Tokyo at gonomitsu@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Junko Hayashi at juhayashi@bloomberg.net, Michael Patterson, Edwin Chan
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