The Mt. Gox Redemption: Heading Toward a Happy Ending?

The story of the infamous cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox seems to be taking a twist that could bring a relatively happy resolution to one of the most dramatic episodes in the short history of digital money.

The development came along thanks to a group of Mt. Gox creditors successfully mounting an effort to pull the exchange out of bankruptcy proceedings and thrust it into an alternative legal process, known as civil rehabilitation.

How it all started Newcomers sometimes read Mt. Gox as "Mount Gox," which is not quite correct - there is no topographical connotation to "Mt." The domain name mtgox.com is short for "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange," and reflects the initial idea with which the service's founder, Jed McCaleb, had registered the website.

Always in pursuit of something bigger and newer, McCaleb lasted for less than a year at the helm of Mt. Gox before selling it to Karpelès, a French developer who was looking for a place to start his big journey in the crypto world.

Mt. Gox sustained another major hack in June 2011, when criminals broke into the system via a compromised computer that allegedly belonged to an auditor.

For a short period of time, the hackers managed to artificially set the price of Bitcoin on Mt. Gox trading platform at one cent, walking away with some 2,000 very 'cheap' coins.

The number of active accounts grew from 3,000 at the start of Karpelès' term to almost 1.1 million in early 2013, propelling Mt. Gox to the status of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, responsible at its peak for almost 90 percent of global Bitcoin trading.

An incident indicative of the CEO's attitude occurred in the wake of the June 2011 hack, when prominent crypto entrepreneurs Jesse Powell, who would later become a co-founder of crypto exchange Kraken, and Bitcoin evangelist Roger Ver were summoned to Tokyo to help get Mt. Gox back online.

Full circle In March 2014, Mt. Gox reported that 200,000 of the lost Bitcoin have been "Discovered" in the old-format digital storage used before the June 2011 hack.

Maybe Mt Gox will come full circle, exit rehabilitation and relaunch as an NFT marketplace for Magic cards.