A man known as “Tokyo Whale,” for the enormous amount of bitcoin he controls, confirms he unloaded another big chunk of it earlier this year.Nobuaki Kobayashi, the trustee of now-defunct Tokyo exchange Mt. Gox, liquidated 24,658 bitcoin and 25,331 bitcoin cash between the creditors’ meeting on March 7, 2018, and the start of civil rehabilitation proceedings on June 22, 2018, according to an announcement posted on the Mt. Gox website on September 25, 2018. As a result, the estate hauled in about 26 billion yen ($230 million) in cash. According to Bloomberg estimates, the latest sale received an average of $8,100 per bitcoin and $1,190 per bitcoin cash. Current values of the coins sit at $6,420 and $438, respectively. This is not the first time Kobayashi has offloaded a huge chunk of crypto. Over a period that correlated with a decline in market prices after December 2017, the trustee sold more than $400 million worth of bitcoin and bitcoin cash. Some accused him of collapsing the markets by selling on spot markets, rather than going through auction or an over-the-counter platform, which is how most big players unload heaps of cryptocurrency. While not specifying how the coins were sold, Kobayashi has denied those claims. In a document posted on June 2018, he stated that “upon consultation with cryptocurrency transaction experts, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash were sold in a manner that had no effect on market...
