He’s not your typical Bitcoin whale, but Nobuaki Kobayashi has become a force to be reckoned with in the cryptocurrency world.
The Tokyo attorney and bankruptcy trustee for the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange disclosed on Wednesday that he sold about $400 million worth of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash since late September. Kobayashi is sitting on another $1.9 billion of the tokens and will consider offloading those too as he raises cash to distribute to Mt. Gox’s creditors.
Once the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection four years ago after disclosing that it lost 850,000 Bitcoins, then worth about $500 million. The company, which later said it recovered about 200,000 Bitcoins, blamed hackers for the loss.
And it was this guy – Tokyo whale and Mt.Gox bankrutpcy trustee who sold almost $400 million worth of BTC, some of it at the very bottom on Feb 6th. He crashed the market by 75% by selling the bitcoins in couple of rounds.
The MT Gox trustee has sold half a billion worth of bitcoin and bitcoin cash between December 2017 and February 2018 it was revealed today.
He sold the first batch of 6k bitcoin on December 22nd, sending price from nearly $16,000 to a brief low of $10,800. Then he waited for market to recover and sold another batch of 8k bitcoins on January 17th. Which again produced the same effect – crashed the bitcoin price.
But he is not done yet – he does another sell on January 31st, this time it was around 6k bitcoins. But vast majority of bitcoins was sold on February 6th which implies that he actually tried to crash the market by selling at the bottom.
And guess what – the market absorbed it and jumped back up to $10k.
But what is worrisome is that this same guy has another 180k BTC up his sleeves, that he is looking to sell in the upcoming period and repay the creditors and users who lost their bitcoin in Mt.Gox hack.
This case makes it the fourth time for Mt.Gox to directly or indirectly crash the bitcoin price. First time was hack in 2011, then a DDos in 2013, 2014 is when they went bankrupt and now this sell off.
And as we have said, this trustee has another 180k bitcoins that will probably cause similar crash – that would be 5th or even 6th if he does it in separate batches.
Nevertheless, bitcoin has showed admirable resilience in spite of all the sell offs and this actually indicates that once Mt.Gox saga is over, bitcoin price should skyrocket and reach new highs as many have predicted.
