Bitcoin’s Tokyo Whale Sold $400 Million and He’s Not Done Yet

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.

A New Kind of Bitcoin Whale
Mt. Gox's bankruptcy trustee is offloading cryptocurrencies to repay 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.

While Kobayashi didn’t provide details on his strategy for offloading the coins, he said he tried to get “as high a price as possible.” Disclosures in his report on the Mt. Gox website suggest his Bitcoin sales since September fetched the equivalent of $10,105 on average. The cryptocurrency was trading at $10,554 as of 10:17 a.m. London time on Wednesday.