ambcrypto.com
Mt. Gox, a Bitcoin exchange platform, continues to linger in the minds of several investors and traders. This is mainly because of the exchange’s part in Bitcoin’s adoption and the hack that led to its doom.
Originally, it went by the name, ‘Magic: The Online Gathering Exchange,’ a platform for trading ‘Magic: The Gathering’ cards. This platform was soon re-modified in order to enable the trade of Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap and also the very first coin in the space. Soon after this, the exchange rose to popularity as it enabled Bitcoin to US Dollar trade.
Moreover, Bitcoin also witnessed one of its major bull runs under the aegis of Mt. Gox. However, Bitcoin’s fall was also under the aegis of the exchange platform. In the year of 2014, the exchange platform lost over 7% of the total Bitcoins in circulation due to a hack.
750,000 of the stolen BTCs were owned by customers of the platform while 100,000 BTCs were owned by the exchange platform. The total worth of the hack at that point in time was approximately around $475 million, making it the biggest ever hack to take place in the cryptocurrency space.
Currently, the exchange platform is undergoing a rehabilitation program, in an attempt to give Bitcoins back to their creditors. Apart from this, Brock Pierce, a former director of Bitcoin Foundation, and a venture capitalist, has begun a project pertaining to Mt. Gox, known as Gox Rising, claiming that his firm has acquired all the rights of Mt. Gox from Mark Karpeles. However, Karpeles has shot down these claims on his Twitter handle.
Recently, Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of Ripple and the CTO of Stellar, spoke about the infamous exchange platform, in an interview with WhatBitcoinDid. Apart from being a part of these leading cryptocurrency projects, McCaleb was also a key contributor to the rise of Mt. Gox and the platform was one of Jed McCaleb’s early projects in the cryptocurrency space.
During the interview, McCaleb elucidated on the key-challenges faced by the exchange in its early days. He said,
“One main like challenge with exchanges then and still today is just getting fiat, you know, on and off the exchange. Like, that’s kind of like, the roadblock for like how successful you can be and like how much money people can put through there, it’s just all like how much fiat you can deposit and withdraw.”
He further said,
“Like, that’s by far the main challenge and and that’s not a very fun one because you’re you’re dealing with like APIs of banks that are like old and crappy and like and you know or just like random like integrations to different payment networks and something that is just not very fun work”
This was followed with McCaleb speaking about the solution the platform came up with in order to tackle the problem. He said,
“We used PayPal Liberty Reserve I can I think there’s another one I think we would take bank wires yeah I think those are the three ways”