Mt. Gox nears October 31 deadline with 34,000 bitcoin unpaid

Mt. Gox has until October 31 to repay the people it owes. The failed bitcoin exchange still holds about 34,387 bitcoin, worth close to $2.9 billion, and thousands of creditors are still waiting more than a decade after it collapsed.

The deadline comes from the estate's court-appointed rehabilitation trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi. He moved it from October 31, 2025 to October 31, 2026, Japan time, in a notice posted on the official Mt. Gox website on October 27, 2025. It covers three payout tracks at once: the base repayment, the early lump-sum repayment and the intermediate repayment. All three now share the same end date.

What the October 31 deadline covers

Kobayashi gave a plain reason for the latest slip. Many creditors, he said, had still not finished the procedures the process requires, and others had hit problems partway through. The hold-up is as much paperwork as logistics. The trustee controls the coins. He cannot make a creditor complete a claim. Until that paperwork is done, the bitcoin stays put.

How much bitcoin is still in the estate

On-chain trackers put the remaining pile at 34,387.51 bitcoin as of September 30, 2026, according to Arkham Intelligence, worth about $2.88 billion that day. Bitcoin traded near $83,900 at around 02:30 UTC on October 7, 2026, according to CoinGecko, down about 2 percent on the day. The estate recovered roughly 200,000 bitcoin after the 2014 failure. The rest has already gone to creditors. What is left is the tail of a very long cleanup.

The balance has barely shifted this year. Arkham tracked 34,689 bitcoin after a 10,608-coin transfer in November 2025, The Block reported, with most of it sent to an unmarked address. By early June 2026, the figure sat near 34,504, after CoinDesk logged a move of 10,422.65 coins to a fresh wallet starting 14FEEM. By late September it was 34,387.51. The drops are small. The big transfers have stayed inside addresses the estate controls.

That number still spooks some traders, who worry it could drag bitcoin's price down. The fear is simple. A fresh batch of coins hits exchanges, supply climbs, and the price falls. The record does not back that up. Both of this cycle's large transfers went to new wallets the estate controls, not to an exchange or a custodian, which is why analysts read them as housekeeping before payout rather than selling.

Each of those moves set off the same ritual. On-chain sleuths flag the transfer within minutes. Headlines ask whether the selling has begun. Then the coins sit, unsent to any exchange, and the worry fades. It has played out that way every time the estate has touched its wallets this cycle.

Why thousands of creditors are still waiting

Being owed money is not the same as being paid. Kobayashi has said many creditors never finished the steps the process needs, from identity checks to bank or wallet details. Others ran into problems along the way. About 19,500 of an estimated 24,000 creditors had been repaid by late September 2026, according to Cryptobriefing, citing the trustee's filings.

That leaves several thousand people still in line. Some lost their claim records years ago. Others sold their claims to funds, which now wait in their place. Nobody has said how many of the remaining creditors asked to be paid in bitcoin rather than cash, which is the one detail that would tell the market how many coins might actually move.

A decade of missed dates

This is not the first slip. The first target was October 31, 2023. It moved to 2024, then 2025, and now 2026. Three delays in a row. Each one needed sign-off from the Tokyo court that oversees the rehabilitation. Creditors have learned to read the date as a ceiling, not a promise.

When the exchange collapsed in February 2014, it had lost hundreds of thousands of coins belonging to users. The estate later recovered close to 200,000 bitcoin. Rising prices turned that pile into one of the strangest windfalls in the market, worth far more today than the dollars users first lost. Prices did the rest. Sorting out who gets what, across many countries and many years, is slow work.

What to watch

Watch the estate's wallets. Any large transfer in the coming weeks will be read, rightly or not, as a sign that distributions are near. Watch where the coins go next. A transfer to a payout exchange would point to real repayments. A move to another cold wallet likely means more waiting. And watch the court. If Kobayashi needs more time, a fourth delay would have to clear Japan's legal system first, the way the last three did.