Nearly USD 9 bn worth of locked-up BTC is about to hit the market — what does it mean for prices?

Some USD 8.7 bn worth of locked-up BTC is about start hitting the market — that can’t be good for the price of the cryptocurrency, can it? Creditors of collapsed Japanese BTC exchange Mt. Gox may start to see BTC and BTC cash trickling into their accounts as early as this week, dumping fresh supply into the market, CNBC reports. About 140k BTC is about to be released, Coindesk adds.

The impetus to sell will be significant because BTC is worth a whole lot more than when these folks lost access to their funds. Creditors getting BTC from Mt. Gox starting this week have been waiting for a decade — Mt. Gox collapsed when BTC was at USD 600 per coin. It’s north of USD 61k now.

What happened at Mt. Gox? It went bankrupt after a 2014 hack saw it loss somewhere between 650k and 950k BTC — worth more than USD 58 bn today. (Most traders think about 750k coins went missing.)

Take it and run? Many of those getting payments this month will sell out of the asset class and “enjoy the fact that having their assets stuck in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy was the best investment they ever made,” John Glover, chief investment officer at Toronto-based crypto startup Ledn, told CNBC.

And there’s the risk that lower summertime liquidity in the market could see all that coin land with a thud that depresses prices: Pundits worry the inflow will start as many in the market have their eyes on the beach, not their trading screens.

BACKGROUND- Mt. Gox is an acronym for Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange. It was created to trade cards from the fantasy-themed game Magic: The Gathering and morphed into the world’s largest crypto exchange, handling c. 70% of the world’s BTC transactions in the currency’s earliest days. It went bankrupt after the biggest of a series of hacks it suffered between 2010 and 2014.

ALSO WORTH KNOWING- Apple has just joined OpenAI’s board “in an observer role,” the Financial Times writes. The agreement came after Apple agreed to integrate ChatGPT into iOS 18, its next operating system now in beta testing and due to market this fall.

It’s a weird move for a bunch of reasons: For starters, Apple rival Microsoft is (effectively — it’s complicated) a 49% owner of OpenAI. And Apple and OpenAI can’t exactly be said to share the same values when it comes to things like intellectual property rights and privacy.

Apple’s Phil Schiller will have a non-voting observer seat on the board — the same as Microsoft does.

MARKETS THIS MORNING-

Major Asian benchmarks are mostly in the green in early trading this morning, with the ASX 200, Nikkei, and Hang Send all in the green, the Kospi flat, and the Shanghai Composite in the red. Futures for the top European benchmarks are up slightly in overnight trading, while Wall Street futures are largely flat after the S&P 500 closed above 5.5k yesterday for the first time.

Somewhere, a bear is hungry: BCA Research is one of a handful of outfits suggesting the US economy could fall into recession later this year or early next, sending the S&P 500 down by as much as 30%. (Fox Business | MarketWatch)

THE CLOSING BELL-

The ADX rose 0.3% yesterday on turnover of AED 938.3 mn. The index is down 5.1% YTD.

In the green: Sharjah Cement and Industrial Development (+6.9%), National Marine Dredging Company (+6.4%) and Bank of Sharjah (+5.3%).

In the red: Waha Capital Company (-3.9%), Ghitha Holding (-3.8%) and Sudatel Telecommunications (-3.8%).

Over on the DFM, the index rose 0.2% on turnover of AED 418.9 mn. Meanwhile Nasdaq Dubai closed down 0.1%.