(Bloomberg) -- Creditors seeking to regain Bitcoin lost on the Japanese exchange Mt. Gox in 2014 have a chance to get their digital assets back before legal claims are settled.
CoinLab Inc. said an agreement with Nobuaki Kobayashi, the trustee to the Mt. Gox bankruptcy, and MGIFLP, a unit of Fortress Investment Group LLC, will allow creditors to consider an offer of as much as 90% of the remaining Bitcoin tied up in the bankruptcy.
The plan must be approved by creditors and investors aren’t obligated to take the early payment and can wait for the lawsuits to settle, CoinLab said in a statement Friday.
Based in Japan, Mt. Gox was once the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, until it closed in early 2014 after losing about 850,000 Bitcoin belonging to thousands of customers. Many of those digital coins have since been found, and a trustee is working to reimburse creditors. The reimbursement has been bogged down in lawsuits for the past seven years.
CoinLab was co-founded in 2012 by Peter Vessenes, who also co-founded the Bitcoin Foundation and has provided security auditing for blockchain networks since about 2015, including on Ethereum. Venture capitalist Tim Draper was an original investor in CoinLab. CoinLab is not part of the settlement and will continue its litigation, according to the statement.
“I am thrilled that people are finally getting paid by Mt. Gox,” Draper said in the statement. “As Mt. Gox’s creditors are some of the earliest believers in cryptocurrency, I look forward to getting my Bitcoin as do the tens of thousands of people that have claims.”
Bitcoin, which traded at $489 the day Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy, hit an all time high earlier this year at $41,982. It traded down 8% to $35,554 as of 1:42 p.m. in New York, according to a composite of prices compiled by Bloomberg.