Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles announced on Friday that the Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange has filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan after hackers took advantage of weaknesses in its computer systems to purloin hundreds of thousands of bitcoins, according to a Reuters report.
Mt. Gox lost 750,000 bitcoins belonging to its users and 100,000 of its own, which at the current exchange rate of about $565, equates to nearly half a billion dollars, according to the report. That is an estimated 7 percent of bitcoins, globally.
The announcement comes weeks after Mt. Gox shut down transactions due to technical issues.
One lawsuit was filed Thursday by Gregory Greene in the U.S. District Court in Chicago, according to the report. He estimated his bitcoin worth at $25,000 and said that Mt. Gox did not provide the adequate protections for which users paid.
