Last month, Seattle-based bitcoin services company CoinLab filed an objection to a plan that begin the rehabilitation of shuttered Tokyo-based exchange Mt.Gox. Late last week, however, CoinLab announced that it was withdrawing its objection and is now supporting the Chapter 15 bankruptcy filing. The Wall Street Journal reports that while CoinLab does not change the status of its $75 million claim against Mt.Gox, the company filed papers on Friday, June 6, declaring that it would not object to Mt.Gox’s bid for bankruptcy protection.
The move may allow the international bankruptcy process to move forward more quickly. If the U.S. case is settled in the upcoming June 17 hearing, it would empower Mt.Gox’s Japanese trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, to consider revival and liquidation bids by Sunlot Holdings and others. The Sunlot proposal is the only publicly known bid, although there may be others, including competing bids from OKCoin and CoinLab. According to the WSJ:
Earlier this year, the Sunlot investor group reached a deal with some creditors that had sued Mt. Gox after news broke of the missing bitcoins. Under the deal, creditors that include some Mt. Gox customers would get a 16.5% ownership stake in Mt. Gox, split a portion of 200,000 bitcoins that were located in a search and share other bitcoins that may still turn up in the investigation.
While CoinLab hasn’t officially endorsed the Sunlot Holdings deal, it is clearly in the company’s best interest to move the process forward. Currently, Mt.Gox’s assets — which include several million dollars and at least 202,000 BTC — are currently frozen until the U.S., Canadian and Japanese cases are settled.
