Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles to Launch New Crypto Exchange This Month
Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles will launch his new crypto platform, EllipX, later this month in Europe.
Karpeles made the announcement in an interview with The Block during Korea Blockchain Week in South Korea.
EllipX will launch in Poland, which Karpeles described as a country he "knows well" as he was based there previously. The new exchange is working to be compliant with the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulatory framework.
MiCA represents a comprehensive set of regulations governing crypto-assets, including provisions for stablecoins.
Karpeles will serve as EllipX's chief technology officer, overseeing the exchange's technical aspects.
A key focus for EllipX will be on transparency for crypto newcomers. “If you look at the top 100 exchanges, the first few ones would be very large ones like Binance, Coinbase … But as you go down the list after five, six names, you won’t even know which companies are running the exchanges,” said Karpeles.
EllipX intends to separate the various operational units of the trading platform. “Because typically, an exchange today is doing both the broker side dealing with customers and the matching side and the storage side, storing crypto and fiat,” Karpeles explained.
Drawing similarities to the New York Stock Exchange, Karpeles said, “Basically what I see for the future is to have one entity that deals with the trading on the market, and brokers located in different countries providing localized service, while the trading entity will only deal with trading.”
“The actual movement of hands on crypto will happen through clearing houses, basically companies like BitGo, that would still be separated from brokers.”
Karpeles hopes that transparency will restore customers' faith in the crypto industry following the collapse of exchanges like FTX.
“By creating this kind of transparency and this kind of environment, other exchanges are hopefully likely to follow,” said Karpeles. “Then transparency will become standard across the industry.”
His own experience with Mt. Gox and its hack scandal is an additional driver for greater transparency.
I've been watching how things evolved after MtGox's collapse while dealing with the case itself, and while some things have changed unrecognizably, there is still a lot of work needed to make cryptocurrencies safe, easy, and useful for everyone. Now that the MtGox distribution…
— Mark Karpelès (@MagicalTux) August 30, 2024
Mt. Gox, which derived its name from "Magic: The Gathering Online EXchange" as it began as a trading platform for the collectible card game, was responsible for over 70% of Bitcoin transactions back in 2014. That year, the platform suffered a hack in which it lost 850,000 BTC.
Creditors only began receiving repayments a decade later in July 2024 through Kraken and Bitstamp.
Owners of Mt. Gox NFTs, which are eligible to all Mt. Gox customers from 2010 to 2014, will also be eligible for a special discount on trading fees on the new exchange.
“Some are actually quite happy because it's been ten years. Of course, everyone wasn’t happy about what happened to Mt. Gox, but as bitcoin’s value increased so much, for many people, it means a lot of profits,” Karpeles said.
“Today, I don't think the security breach would have happened. And even if something similar happened and bitcoin was stolen, we would have noticed immediately,” he added.