The former CEO of crypto exchange MT. GOX, Mark Karpeles announced that some of its users who opened accounts between 2010 to 2014 will get commemorative NFTs from their upcoming airdrop.
Between the implied time span from 2010 to 2014, the exchange suffered a cyberattack, which forced the platform to declare bankruptcy. The users within this span, who have a balance in their account or have claimed losses could register to claim free NFTs from the inoperative exchange.
“Mt. Gox customers are early adopters, some of them were on BitcoinTalk when Satoshi Nakamoto was still posting,” said the project website. “A new token or NFT airdrop is a great way to engage users and at the same time erase a bit of the loss incurred in Mt. Gox.”
To claim NFTs, users must be required to go through a verification process to verify that they were former customers of the exchange who created accounts before Feb 25, 2014.
The NFT will be ERC-721 token compliant, which will be issued on the Polygon blockchain. The NFT allocation will be based on the identification of users’ Mt. Gox account numbers as well as their remaining balances in Bitcoin and Japanese yen. However, users who had claimed their balance will also be eligible for NFT airdrop.
Detailing the use cases for the Mt. Gox NFT, the announcement stated, “Owning a MtGox NFT proves you’re OG. You were there in the early days of Bitcoin, and now you can prove it on the blockchain”.
Mt. Gox was developed by programmer Jed McCaleb in 2010 and was acquired by Karpeles later. At that time the platform was the largest crypto exchange platform in the world as the crypto was in infancy.
Unfortunately, the 2011 hack resulted in the loss of 850,000 BTC, which the current price is nearly $40 billion at the time of writing. After losing this big amount, the platform’s legacy diminished and left thousands of its users empty handed.
Despite the sudden collapse, Mt. Gox’s trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi has taken action to reimburse creditors of the exchange for years. In November, Nobuaki Kobayashi revealed the finalization of the Rehabilitation plan filed in the Tokyo District court.
However, the commemorative NFT website made clear that the NFTs are “fully independent” from the Mt. Gox bankruptcy case and “100% self-funded.”
