MtGox operator looks to sell Bitcoin trademarks: report
The holding company of collapsed virtual currency exchange MtGox is looking to sell the trademark to the word Bitcoin, The Wall Street Journal said Wednesday.
The company hopes to raise at least 100 million yen, or about $1 million, for a package including the Bitcoin trademarks in Japan and the European Union, the Journal quoted an executive of the company as saying.
It is also looking for a buyer for the domain name bitcoins.com, the paper said, adding it was unclear whether any money from the sale would be used to pay back the creditors of MtGox.
The executive said the company wanted to sell the trademarks because it had no use for them, the Journal said, without naming the company official.
Tibanne, a company headed by former MtGox chief Mark Karpeles, had its registration of the Bitcoin trademark approved in Japan in 2012, an AFP search of the online database of the patent authority ahowed.
Tibanne was effectively the operator of the troubled Bitcoin exchange since MtGox had no staff, the Journal said. The two companies shared the same office address in Tokyo.
MtGox filed for bankruptcy protection in late February, saying it had debts of 6.5 billion yen and that it had lost 850,000 units of the crypto-currency. It later said it had found about 200,000 of them.
The company is to be liquidated after a Japanese court ordered bankruptcy proceedings in April.
The spectacular failure of MtGox hammered the digital currency's reputation.
The online exchange went dark in February, shortly after it blocked Bitcoin withdrawals, claiming there was a bug in the software that underpins the virtual currency, making it vulnerable to thieves.
© 2014 AFP
