Vitalik Buterin Defends Mt. Gox’s Mark Karpeles, “Deserves a Path to Redemption”

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Vitalik Buterin Believes Mark Karpeles Deserves a Second Chance
  • Vitalik Buterin defends Mark Karpeles, former Mt. Gox CEO, advocating redemption for past actions.
  • Buterin praises Karpeles for contributions beyond Mt. Gox and being involved in “‘interesting stuff.”
  • The founder went on to compare him with a memecoin trader.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has spoken out in defense of Mark Karpeles, the former CEO of the defunct Mt. Gox exchange.

In a tweet, Buterin said that Karpeles is the “only ‘crypto villain from a previous era’ who deserves a path to redemption.” He praised Karpeles for “just quietly doing interesting stuff” and criticized an unnamed person for focusing on “meme coins” like Doge and Mog.

Karpeles was the CEO of Mt. Gox, once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange. However, the exchange filed for bankruptcy in 2014 after it lost hundreds of thousands of bitcoins belonging to its customers. Karpeles has always maintained that the bitcoins were lost due to a hacking attack. However, some people believe that he was responsible for the loss of the bitcoins.

However, according to Wu Blockchain’s post in November 2023, some creditors of the now-defunct Mt.Gox have received an email from the bankruptcy trustee announcing their intention to initiate repayments. The email stated that the trustee is actively working to start the repayments within the year.

Towards the end of 2023, the creditors of Mt.Gox claimed that the company had begun to reimburse their Bitcoin that had been stuck on the exchange since February 24, 2014. According to the creditors, Mt.Gox has initiated the repayment process via PayPal and has sent Japanese yen to their accounts. 

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