After a decade of anticipation, July might finally bring restitution to the users of the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange.

Mt. Gox, the cryptocurrency exchange infamous for losing 850,000 Bitcoin in 2014, has announced that it will begin repaying its defunct users starting in July 2024. The repayments will be processed in Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), according to a statement issued on June 24.

The rehabilitation trustee will commence repayments in collaboration with cryptocurrency exchanges that have completed the necessary information exchange and confirmation for implementing the repayments. The order of payments will depend on the respective cryptocurrency exchange. The trustee has urged users to be patient, emphasizing that repayments will begin once all preparations are complete.

The total amount owed to approximately 127,000 creditors is more than $9.4 billion. Creditors have been waiting for over a decade to recover their funds following the exchange’s collapse in 2014 due to multiple unnoticed hacks.

In May, Mt. Gox transferred 141,686 BTC worth $9.62 billion into a new wallet, marking the first on-chain movement of funds from the collapsed exchange in over five years. This transfer was part of the repayment process, as confirmed by the rehabilitation trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi.

Mt. Gox was one of the earliest cryptocurrency exchanges and once handled over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions. The exchange went offline in 2014 after a significant security breach resulted in the loss of user funds, causing Bitcoin’s price to fall below $500. The current Bitcoin price is over $61,100.

Despite the recent announcement, it is possible that the repayments could face further delays, as has been the case with previous deadlines. The initial repayment deadline was set for September 2023 but was later moved to October 31, 2023.

The long-awaited repayments are a significant development in the cryptocurrency world, providing some relief to the creditors who have been waiting for more than ten years to reclaim their lost funds.