Mt. Gox was the exchange that collapsed in 2014 after losing customer bitcoins.
Originally launched in 2010, Mt. Gox became the dominant Bitcoin exchange and handled more than 70% of worldwide Bitcoin trading by early 2014. In February of that year it halted withdrawals, suspended trading, took its website offline, and entered bankruptcy proceedings in Japan.
The company reported that hundreds of thousands of bitcoins belonging to customers and the exchange had disappeared. Investigations later concluded that most or all of the missing coins were likely stolen over time from Mt. Gox’s hot wallet, although the collapse also exposed severe security and management failures. About 200,000 bitcoins were later found in an older wallet, reducing the reported loss.
Mt. Gox is often confused with later exchange failures such as FTX, which collapsed in 2022, or with hacks affecting Bitfinex. Mt. Gox’s 2014 failure became one of the defining early crises in cryptocurrency history and helped prompt stronger scrutiny and regulation of digital-asset exchanges.