The former CEO of now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox has announced that certain users will be eligible to receive commemorative non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
In a Monday announcement on Twitter, Mark Karpelès said that crypto users who were clients of Mt. Gox between 2010 and 2014, during which time the exchange was hacked and subsequently declared bankrupt, could register to claim a free NFT. According to the CEO, the offer was extended to users who claimed losses from the defunct exchange or had a balance.
“Mt. Gox customers were early adopters, some of them were on BitcoinTalk when Satoshi Nakamoto was still posting,” the project website said. “A new NFT token or airdrop is a great way to attract users while also erasing some of the loss suffered on Mt. Gox.”
You can claim your @MtGox NFT on https://t.co/uUVPsXtCYC if you were a MtGox customer between 2010 and 2014. The NFT is airdropped for free, and available no matter if you had a balance or filed a claim with the bankruptcy.
— Mark Karpelès (@MagicalTux) March 28, 2022
Mt. Gox users must verify that they were clients of the exchange who registered accounts before February 25, 2014. NFTs will comply with ERC-721, will be issued on the Polygon blockchain and identified according to users’ Mt. Gox account numbers. as well as your remaining balances in Bitcoin (BTC) and Japanese Yen, although including the balance is optional.
“A hard-coded limit will prevent any NFT outside of the range of Mt. Gox accounts from being created. This minting method will not have an owner-only limitation, but instead will require an externally signed token to be issued to users who have completed verification.”
First launched in 2010 by programmer Jed McCaleb and later bought by Karpelès, Mt. Gox was once one of the largest exchanges in the world. However, A 2011 hack that resulted in the loss of 850,000 BTC ($460 million at the time and roughly $40 billion at press time), as well as the exchange’s collapse, left thousands of cryptocurrency holders penniless.
Nobuaki Kobayashi, the trustee of Mt. Gox, has worked to compensate the exchange’s creditors for years, announcing in November 2021 that a rehabilitation plan filed in the Tokyo District Court had become “final and binding.” However, according to the NFT memorial website, NFTs are “entirely separate” from the Mt. Gox bankruptcy case and “100% self-funded.”
Although the recently announced NFTs are apparently the only “official” ones to emerge from the Mt. Gox collapse, some crypto users have latched onto the controversy surrounding the exchange’s hack and bankruptcy since 2014. One of the cards in Spells of Genesis, a blockchain-based trading card game, parodies a photo of cryptocurrency trader Kolin Burges protesting outside the Tokyo stock exchange’s headquarters in 2014 with a sign reading “Where is he? our money?”. The game issued 700 of the ‘Gox, the Fallen Mountainlord’ cards in 2015.
The project’s whitepaper also said that NFTs could be modified to include art after publication, and hinted at other use cases:
“Having an NFT from Mt. Gox shows that you are OG. You were there in the early days of Bitcoin, and now you can prove it on the blockchain […] it is possible to take advantage of this in the future in ways that are not yet known.”
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