The Price of Bitcoin is Dropping During Nobuaki Kobayashi Reveal

Bitcoin is dropping in price during a spate of bad news, with unauthorized sells on the Binance exchange and the reveal of a trustee from the Mt. Gox exchange that has been selling off $400 million worth of cryptocurrency.

At the time of writing on Thursday, the price of one bitcoin is at $9,910.70, a seven percent decrease in the space of 24 hours. The drop is part of a multi-day decline since its $11,629 price on March 5.

The sell-off comes as Nobuaki Kobayashi, a Japan-based attorney and trustee for the defunct Mt. Gox, revealed on Wednesday that he’s sold $400 million in both bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash since September 2017. The exchange filed for bankruptcy in 2014 after a catastrophic hack. Kobayashi said that he has a further $1.9 billion worth of bitcoins to sell, but as the exchange owed creditors around $414 million after the bankruptcy, it’s unclear whether more will be sold.

The news comes at the same time as reports of odd activity on the Binance exchange. In a two-minute time period on Wednesday, the VIA/BTC market saw a large-scale phishing attempt. Changpeng Zhao, Binance CEO, responded swiftly through Twitter:

The Kobayashi news was met with incredulity in the bitcoin community. In a front-page thread entitled “Is the MTGOX lawyer the dumbest person in crypto?” Reddit user “Renben9” noted that the use of regular exchanges rather than OTC trades normally used for large sums was a curious move.

Another user, “riverflop,” showed in the cryptocurrency subreddit that the point where Kobayashi transfers took place coincides with price dips.

However, some saw the Kobayashi revelations in a positive light. After the Mt. Gox exchange crashed, the price moved from over $1,100 in 2013 to an end-of-year drop of $550. When Kobayashi sold at the $6,000 mark in February, the market didn’t crash.

With a far larger market now worth $402 billion, the cryptocurrency world can absorb these moves better than it could in the Mt. Gox days.