Categories
Waukesha, Wis.
— The world’s biggest bitcoin exchange, Mt.
Gox, is reporting a steep drop in trading volume this week, and its CEO is saying that the company is going to shut down for good.
The Mt.
Gox website has been inaccessible since Friday, with users reporting that the site was down for hours before finally returning around 2:00 p.m.
ET Monday.
The website’s bitcoin exchange rate is down about 3.5% since the day of the outage.
A report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance says that Mt.gox’s bitcoin market share dropped to 13.5%, and that this was mainly due to an “excess of demand.”
It also notes that the exchange has been plagued by cyber attacks for months.
“Due to an excessive number of incidents, we decided to temporarily halt our operations and shut down the bitcoin trading platform on December 10th,” Mt.gyx said in a statement Monday.
“We are currently looking for a new platform to operate, and we will provide updates as soon as possible.”
Mt.
Gix is one of several bitcoin exchanges that have been hit by the ongoing cyberattacks, which have seen hackers try to steal money from the wallets of its customers.
Last week, the FBI announced that it was investigating Mt.GPox, a Japanese bitcoin exchange that had been hit with hacking attempts in the past.
The FBI says it found evidence of fraud at the Mt.PGox trading platform.
A spokesperson for Mt.mgox told Bloomberg News that the news was incorrect, and the company has nothing to do with the hacking.
“We have been cooperating with the authorities and have zero knowledge of this situation.
We will provide the full facts as soon we can,” the spokesperson said.
Mt Gox said that its bitcoin trading account has been “shut down indefinitely.”
“This was due to the severe cyber attacks on our systems, and now it has been decided that we will shut down all our trading accounts permanently,” the Mt Gox spokesperson said in the statement.
Mountain Gox CEO John Carmack said in an interview with Bloomberg that the attack on the exchange had “caused a lot of confusion, confusion, and stress.”
“There are a lot more questions now,” Carmack added.
“People are wondering what the status is of our accounts, and there’s a lot less information out there about what’s going on.”
MintPal, another bitcoin exchange with a strong bitcoin community, also reported a steep decline in trading activity.
Its exchange rate dropped about 5% since Friday morning.
In the past 24 hours, the price of one bitcoin has fallen about 5%, according to CoinDesk.
CoinDesk is not identifying the hackers who have attempted to steal funds from Mt.
Pal because they are not yet known to the FBI.
Mt.
Pal’s bitcoin trading volume has been declining for months, according to Bitcoin Magazine.
This article was originally published on ESPN.com
