MtGox Gusher Dampens Bitcoin | Billionaire Cohen Abandons Crypto VC

The asset manager’s new short-term credit fund is hosted on the Ethereum blockchain.

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Mitchell Martin Senior Editor, Forbes Money & Markets
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Steven Ehrlich Director, Forbes Digital Assets
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BITCOIN SLUMPS ON MTGOX PLAN TO RETURN 140,000 TOKENS TO CUSTOMERS

Bitcoin maxis looking for an opportunity to buy a dip were handed one on a silver platter last week when the failed MtGox exchange said it would start returning the cryptocurrency to investors who have been waiting since the exchange closed in 2014 to receive compensation. Unlike the FTX bankruptcy, in which creditors were cashed out at the face value of their holdings plus interest from the time the exchange closed, MtGox is planning to distribute about 140,000 bitcoins, worth $9 billion at the time of its Monday announcement.

That announcement, however, took some of the wind out of bitcoin’s sails. The currency, which ended the previous week at $64,121, briefly slumped below $60,000 when the announcement was posted on the MtGox website on Monday, though it clawed back some of that loss and traded late Friday at $60,123. The entire 140,000 coins are unlikely to hit the market all at once for a couple of reasons: investors are facing a huge hit from capital-gains taxes on a token that went for $489 at the time MtGox closed and 75,000 of the tokens are going to large claim funds and a separate bankruptcy proceeding.

“From speaking with several LPs in these funds, we do not believe there will be significant selling from this cohort,” Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital, wrote in a note issued before the announcement. “Similarly, Bitcoinica (a bitcoin exchange that also was hacked and whose trustee put their recovered coins into MtGox for safekeeping…) will not be able to sell upon payout because the funds will then go into their own bankruptcy process in New Zealand.”

By the way, there is no mountain associated with Tokyo-based MtGox. The exchange grew out of a card-trading service called Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange. It failed after multiple hacks resulted in the theft of 950,000 bitcoins.

STEVE COHEN EXITS CRYPTO VENTURE CAPITAL IN FAVOR OF AI AND DEFENSE

Billionaire Steve Cohen’s Point72 Ventures, is pivoting away from crypto and fintech after laying off its five investors focused on those areas, Forbes has learned. The venture-capital division of Cohen’s Point72 Ventures will instead shift more focus to investing in artificial intelligence and defense technology startups, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

“We are always evaluating our portfolio’s performance and market opportunity and optimizing our strategy and resources around what we think is the biggest opportunity set,” a Point72 spokesperson said in a statement to Forbes and would not comment beyond that.

CURRENT PRICE OF TOP 5 COINS (7-Day % Change)

Coin

Price

Percent Change

Bitcoin (BTC)

$60,123

6.3%

Ether (ETH)

$3,371

4.2%

Tether (USDT)

$0.9955

0.3%

Binance Coin (BNB)

$569

2.8%

Solana (SOL)

$140

6.6%

Sources: Forbes Digital Assets, CoinGecko. Prices as of 4:00 p.m. on June 28, 2024.

SOLANA’S HACKATHON HACK FOR RECRUITING RELUCTANT VCS

Cohen is not the only investor tapping the brakes on capital, and the Solana Foundation, which supports the eponymous blockchain, has a workaround that is showing signs of working. It has outsourced its hackathon competitions to a company called Colosseum, cofounded by Matty Taylor, the Solana executive who used to run those contests, which provide a way for developers to publicize their abilities to solve technological problems using the Solana blockchain and take home some cash to boot.

There are several six-week competitions each year, and the plan is for Colosseum to run investment funds that provide early-stage financing to some of the winners. The key is that the funds will benefit from insight of Solana specialists, notably Taylor.

Colosseum announced that the first such fund had raised $60 million from investors. The Solana Foundation was one of the biggest, but to the extent that Colosseum can identify winning projects for outside parties the system will attract outside capital to projects that will generate interest in the blockchain.

Separately, VanEck filed for permission last week to sell what would be the first exchange-traded Solana fund in the U.S.

JULIAN ASSANGE WILL TAKE YOUR BITCOIN

The former Wikileaks editor, Julian Assange, worked out a plea deal that got him out of a British lockup, admitting to a U.S. charge of conspiring to disclose information related to American national defense in exchange for the 62 months he spent incarcerated at Belmarsh Prison in London. But he is not exactly getting out of jail free: his family says it cost him half a million dollars for charter flights to the U.S. commonwealth of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, where he pleaded guilty, and then on to Australia. The pricey travel was necessary because Assange did not want to set foot in the 50 states, according to a post on Crowdfunder, a crowdfunding site where supporters are trying to raise 552,000 pounds ($656,000) to cover the flight and health expenses.

The funding campaign, which has already raised 456,000 pounds, only takes credit cards and bank drafts, and not all of Assange’s supporters want their donations to be that public. So Assange’s family set up a page on BTCPay, a kind of do-it-yourself crypto billing service, where payments can be made in a more anonymous manner.

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