Mt. Gox’s Legal Head Resigns As He Wants To “Move On”

By Rishma Banerjee

Infamous exchange, Mt. Gox, has always been a known name in the cryptospace but always for the wrong reasons. It has now come to light that, the head of the biggest organised creditor group representing the former users of the failed exchange is stepping down amid what he apprehends will be as a prolonged legal medium that could take years to fully resolve.

The founder and coordinator of the legal side to Mt. Gox, Andy Pag agreed to an interview by CoinDesk and explained that he now believes that the ongoing legal problems might hold up the crypto exchange’s civil rehabilitation process for up to two more years. The fact that he would be stepping down as coordinator, by the end of this month was revealed last week when he first showed his opinion of the expected timeline in a private forum post.

Mt. Gox was once the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, however,  in 2014 it filed for bankruptcy after its operators found that 850,000 Bitcoins had been stolen from its wallets. Though some of the funds were recovered, the majority are still out there in the hands of some hacker, never to be seen again. Then, when between 2014 and 2017 there was a huge increase in price, the crypto exchange went from a bankruptcy proceeding to a civil rehabilitation process that is still ongoing to this day.

Rather than waiting for a court system to decide whether this claim is legit or not, Pag said that he intends to sell his claim and step down from Mt. Gox legal and move on with his life.

He said,

“I’ve put my career on hold for 18 months and… It’s just a big regret that we’ve kind of been outplayed by other parties. In 2014 I had this money sitting there and it was this great big windfall and it was amazing and I had all these plans that I was going to put into place with it. It’s not losing the money that stung, it’s losing those plans and not being able to doing those things I wanted to do, and there’s a bit of a repeat here.”