Mt. Gox’s rehabilitation trustee has extended the deadline for repaying creditors of the defunct cryptocurrency exchange to October 31, 2027, with approval from a Tokyo court.

Trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi said many creditors have not completed the procedures required to receive their repayments, while a considerable number encountered problems during the process. The change was disclosed in a notice dated Friday. The previous deadline had been October 31, 2026.

Kobayashi said base, early lump-sum and intermediate repayments have largely been completed for creditors who finished the necessary procedures and did not face processing issues. However, “many rehabilitation creditors still have not received their Repayments because they have not completed the necessary procedures for receiving Repayments,” he wrote. A “considerable number” of other creditors remain unpaid because of issues arising during the repayment process.

This is the fourth consecutive one-year extension to the deadline. The trustee initially moved it from October 2023 to October2024, then to October 2025, and finally to October 2026 last October, citing incomplete procedures and processing problems. By that point, approximately 19,500 creditors had received funds.

Wallets linked to Mt. Gox still hold about 34,388 BTC, valued at roughly $2.8 billion, according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham. That is a fraction of the roughly 141,686 BTC the estate held ahead of the first distributions in mid-2024, a measure of how much has already been paid out. Arkham’s data shows no transfers from the estate since June, when it moved 10,422.65 BTC—then worth more than $739 million—from cold storage, mostly to a new wallet. The transfer did not indicate a sale or a new round of creditor repayments.

The repayment deadline change was approved by the Tokyo court overseeing the rehabilitation process. The trustee’s official announcement is available here. The near-term focus now is whether the remaining creditors complete their receipt procedures before the new cutoff, with any future movement from the estate’s wallets visible on Arkham’s public explorer.

A decade-long wait

Mt. Gox was once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange—at its peak handling the majority of all Bitcoin transactions—before collapsing in 2014, when roughly 850,000 BTC went missing. In 2021, a Tokyo court approved the exchange’s civil rehabilitation plan, clearing the way for the return of roughly $9 billion in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to an estimated 24,000 creditors through registered exchanges. Under that plan, eligible creditors could receive part of their repayment in cryptocurrency rather than the fiat value of their claims at the time of the collapse.

The repayments initially unsettled the market. After the trustee announced in June 2024 that distributions would begin in July, Bitcoin fell as low as $61,060, a 6.5% one-day decline, as traders prepared for creditors to sell. Mt. Gox wallets held about 141,686 BTC at the time.

Later delays produced little reaction. An extension announced in October 2024 briefly lifted Bitcoin’s price by keeping potential supply from reaching the market.

Observers now regard the remaining coins as a smaller market risk. “The amount is small relative to the liquidity and trading volumes in today’s Bitcoin market,” Markus Levin, co-founder of decentralized data network XYO, told Decrypt in June. “At this point it’s more of a recurring headline than a real source of downside pressure.”