Mt. Gox Trustee’s Bitcoin Sales Led To Manipulation of Market Prices

By Prashant Jha

On February 5, the infamous Goxdox blog returned to spill the beans on the trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi’s Bitcoin sale. The blog suggests that the trustee who promised he won’t be selling his Bitcoin in bulk on traditional platforms did exactly that and sold large sums of his BTC and BCH on the Bitcoin exchange.

The blog also suggests that the trustee’s decision to make a U-turn on his statement and dumping large sums of BTC might have impacted the market prices significantly.

Last year Nobuaki Kobayashi was the centre of attention for the amount of BTC and BCH holdings in his possession. The public was assured that the trustee would make a responsible decision and instead of selling his Bitcoin fortunes on a traditional exchange, he would sell it in a way that it would not dilute the market.

Goxdox Suggests Nobuaki Kobayashi is Not a Man of his Words

The recent explosive revelation suggests that there were no private auctions held by the trustee to sell his Bitcoins. The community noticed that the trustee’s withdrawal coincided with the January lows of BTC. This made it evident that the trustee might not be a man of his words and decided to do exactly what he promised he won’t do.

Now the obvious question is how do we know it’s Bitpoint that the trustee used to dump his Bitcoin. Well, the Goxdox blogger is in possession of the bank book of the trustee which has BitPoint printed in Japanese at the footer. The Goxdox report reads,

“Unless Bitpoint is being really generous, we’d wager the reason they are depositing billions JPY into the trustee’s bank account is because they were hired to sell the Mt. Gox Estate’s BTC/BCH.”

The Bank Book Reveals Much More Than Assumptions Made By Community

The Goxdox report in possession with the bank book of the trustee shows that Nobuaki Kobayashi received multiple wire transfers, 22 to be exact, between May 1 and June 4. The bank ledger does not have any records before Feb 23, 2018

The first transfer added $312. Million worth of JPY to the trustee’s initial balance and the BitPoint exchange sold roughly ¥24 billion JPY worth of BTC/BCH during that period. The reason for sending so many wired transfers was to avoid counterparty risk in case Bitpoint security gets breached.

The report further states,

The new data from the trustee’s bank book coupled with BTC’s price declines in May/June 2018 indicate that the method Bitpoint used to conduct the sale affected price discovery — In other words, Bitpoint sold on an exchange and not OTC.