Mark Karpeles announces commemorative NFT drop for Mt. Gox users

cointelegraph.com:

The former chief executive officer of now defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox has announced that certain users will be eligible to receive commemorative nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.

In a Monday announcement on Twitter, Mark Karpelès said that crypto users who were Mt. Gox customers between 2010 and 2014 — during which time the exchange was hacked and subsequently declared bankruptcy — could register to claim a free NFT. According to the CEO, the offer extended to users who claimed losses from the defunct exchange or had a balance.

“Mt. Gox customers are early adopters, some of them were on BitcoinTalk when Satoshi Nakamoto was still posting,” said the project website. “A new token or NFT airdrop is a great way to engage users and at the same time erase a bit of the loss incurred in Mt. Gox.”

You can claim your @MtGox NFT on https://t.co/uUVPsXtCYC if you were a MtGox customer between 2010 and 2014. The NFT is airdropped for free, and available no matter if you had a balance or filed a claim with the bankruptcy.

Mt. Gox users are required to verify they were customers of the exchange who registered accounts before Feb. 25, 2014. The NFTs will be ERC-721 compliant, issued on the Polygon blockchain, and identified according to users’ Mt. Gox account numbers as well as their remaining balances in Bitcoin (BTC) and Japanese yen — though including the balance is optional.

First launched in 2010 by programmer Jed McCaleb and later purchased by Karpelès, Mt. Gox was once one of the largest exchanges in the world. However, a 2011 hack which resulted in the loss of 850,000 BTC — $460 million at the time and roughly $40 billion at the time of publication — as well as the exchange’s collapse left thousands of crypto holders out of pocket.