The first major Bitcoin exchange to collapse in 2014 was Mt. Gox.
Founded in Tokyo in 2010, Mt. Gox became the dominant Bitcoin marketplace during the currency’s early years. By 2013 and early 2014, it handled more than 70% of global Bitcoin trading, making its failure especially damaging to public confidence.
The exchange halted Bitcoin withdrawals on February 7, 2014, then suspended trading and took its website offline later that month. Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan on February 28, reporting that hundreds of thousands of customer and company bitcoins were missing. Investigations later concluded that most or all had been stolen from its hot wallet over several years.
A common mix-up is confusing Mt. Gox with later collapses such as FTX, which filed for bankruptcy in 2022. Kraken, Binance, and Coinbase were not the exchange that suffered the landmark 2014 failure.