What happened
Today, 27 October 2025, the Mt. Gox rehabilitation trustee extended the deadline for the Base Repayment, the Early Lump-Sum Repayment and the Intermediate Repayments from 31 October 2025 to 31 October 2026 (trustee announcement, 27 October 2025). It is the fifth extension, after 31 July 2023, 30 September 2023, 31 October 2023, 31 October 2024 and 31 October 2025. Coin distributions themselves began on 5 July 2024.
What it changes
Another year on a clock creditors do not control, and a good moment to correct the standard line, which is that Mt. Gox creditors were "repaid in bitcoin".
Under the rehabilitation plan every claim is re-denominated: repayment "shall be calculated in yen" (rehabilitation plan). Coin claims become a fixed unit at rates struck the day before the 22 June 2018 commencement order, 749,318.83 yen to one bitcoin and 97,481.19 yen to one bitcoin cash. Only a portion is delivered as coin, out of coins the estate already held, since the trustee's policy is "to not make additional purchase of Bitcoin". Creditors elected crypto or cash irrevocably by 6 April 2023, and failing to elect meant cash.
The rate applies in reverse too, which is the part almost nobody explains: the crypto leg is translated back at that same 749,318.83 yen rather than at the market price on the day. What a creditor is owed there is a quantity of coins, worth whatever bitcoin is worth when it lands.
The award: the first 200,000 units of a claim are paid in full, fiat first. The Early Lump-Sum Repayment takes a fixed 21 percent of the balance remaining after the Base Repayment, and comes back roughly 70 percent crypto and 30 percent fiat. A one bitcoin claim on that path paid about 0.147 bitcoin plus about 47,000 yen, our arithmetic from the plan's rates, not a figure the trustee publishes.
Whether that is good depends on which claim it is measured against:
- Against the superseded 2014 bankruptcy valuation of 50,058.12 yen per bitcoin, fixed by rule under article 103(2)(i)(a) of the Bankruptcy Act (FAQ, April 2015), roughly nineteen times as much.
- Against the claim actually adjudicated in rehabilitation, 749,318.83 yen, roughly 1.3 times, which after eleven years is close to nothing in real terms.
- Against the deposit, one bitcoin in and about a seventh of it back.
Set that beside FTX, which paid its first creditors in petition-date dollars in February 2025 at 16,871.63 dollars per bitcoin. Same asset, same kind of failure, two legal regimes, outcomes an order of magnitude apart. The variable is not the recovery rate. It is who owns the appreciation between failure and payout, and that is settled by the valuation date and the settlement currency. Japanese bankruptcy did here what Chapter 11 does, freezing the claim at a 2014 price; rehabilitation moved the date, "roughly 15 times" the bankruptcy rate by the plan's own description, and settled part of the claim in the asset itself.
What it does not change
It did not make anyone whole. Allowed claims as at March 2020 stood at 738,747,941,403 yen across 36,797 holders, the bitcoin portion of which, 646,155,221,450 yen, equals 862,323.5 BTC at the plan's rate. Roughly 141,686 BTC remained after the trustee's sales (report, 26 September 2018), about a sixth of that by coin count, a ratio that is ours: no trustee document states a recovery percentage, and the 21 percent above is a rate on a yen balance.
It did not make it fast. Eleven years, and repayments routed through Kraken, Bitstamp, Bitbank, SBI VC Trade and BitGo, the trustee citing "compliance with financial regulations in each country" among the causes of delay. More than 19,000 creditors had been repaid as at 21 August 2024, and more than 19,500 as at 27 March 2025. Those headcounts are the only progress metric the trustee publishes: there is no running total of bitcoin distributed, and repayments are not complete.
And it is not a crypto rule. Civil rehabilitation is generic Japanese insolvency law which, unlike bankruptcy, does not convert non-monetary claims into monetary ones (trustee, 22 June 2018). It applied here only because creditors petitioned for it and the surplus was worth the fight. Chapter 11 has no equivalent lever, so this is not a template FTX creditors could have used.
The change of regime is why creditors got anything above a 2014 price. It is not why they got their bitcoin back, because most of it was never there.
Context
Under the bankruptcy, claims were frozen at 2014 prices and the multi-billion surplus above them would have reverted to shareholders: Tibanne held 88 percent of MtGox, Mark Karpelès 100 percent of Tibanne. The plan records the petitioning creditors' reasoning, theirs and not a finding by trustee or court, that it "would be extremely unfair and unjustifiable" for shareholders to benefit from the price increase. They petitioned on 24 November 2017; the Tokyo District Court ordered civil rehabilitation on 22 June 2018, case 2017 (sai) no. 35, staying the bankruptcy. The plan was confirmed on 20 October 2021, final and binding on 16 November 2021, approximately 99 percent of voting creditors in favour.
What is not settled is how many of the remaining holders are paid before next October, and whether this deadline holds better than the four before it.