You may remember Mt. Gox, once by far the largest bitcoin (BTC) exchange in the world. Until it was hacked and then went bankrupt. No less than 850,000 BTC was stolen then, they were worth about $400 million at the time and more than $40 billion today.
Still, the platform’s former owner, Mark Karpelès, wants to pay tribute to all the early bitcoin investors who traded through Mt. gox. Anyone who climbs a Mt. Gox account is eligible for a free non-fungible token (NFT). The former CEO announced this on March 28.
You can claim your @MtGox NFT on https://t.co/uUVPsXtCYC if you were a MtGox customer between 2010 and 2014. The NFT is airdropped for free, and available no matter if you had a balance or filed a claim with the bankruptcy.
— Mark Karpeles (@MagicalTux) March 28, 2022
No fewer than 1,066,097 NFTs are created. That equates to the total number of accounts ever created on the Mt. Gox platform. Each NFT shows the latest balance of your account on Mt. Gox, but customers will be given the option to hide this when they claim their token.
Customers who had no balance or who filed bankruptcy are also eligible for an NFT. Investors must first go through a verification process to prove that they were actually the original owner of a particular account on Mt. gox.
NFTs for Bitcoin OGs
The NFTs serve as a kind of recognition for early bitcoin investors, the website reports:
“Clients of Mt. Gox are early adopters, some of them were on BitcoinTalk when even Satoshi Nakamoto was still posting.
Owning a Mt. Gox NFT proves you are an OG. You were there in the early days of Bitcoin, and now you can prove it on the blockchain.”
The NFTs are created on the Ethereum (ETH) network, probably via Polygon (MATIC), a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum.
These NFTs have nothing to do with the restructuring process that is still ongoing. Many longtime investors of Mt. Gox are still waiting for their money that they lost during one of the hacks at the time.