In 2014, Mt. Gox — once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange — collapsed almost overnight. When traders logged in, they were stunned to find their balances wiped out. The company soon admitted that around 850,000 bitcoins had vanished. At that time, the loss equaled about $450 million, but at today’s price of $114,000 per $BTC , the missing stash would be worth nearly $100 billion.
The disappearance wasn’t the result of a single high-profile hack. Instead, bitcoins were siphoned off slowly over several years, while customers kept trading, unaware their funds were slipping away. By the time the scale of the problem became clear, Mt. Gox had already imploded.
Investigators later traced much of the stolen crypto to wallets linked to Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national who operated the notorious $BTC -e exchange. $BTC -e acted as a laundering hub, processing billions in illicit digital currency — including the Mt. Gox haul.
Vinnik’s 2017 arrest sparked a geopolitical tug-of-war, as the U.S., France, and Russia all sought to prosecute him. Meanwhile, Mt. Gox creditors are still receiving partial repayments, more than a decade after the disaster. The case remains one of crypto’s darkest chapters — a reminder of just how fragile the early exchange era really was.