First Mover Americas: NFT Platform ImmutableX's IMX Token Rallies

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Mt. Gox has pushed back the date for its planned repayments by another 12 months, the trustees for the firm said on Thursday. The defunct crypto exchange had earlier said the deadline for repayments would be Oct. 31, 2023. That has now been pushed back to Oct. 31, 2024. The creditors of Mt. Gox have been looking for some sort of relief for a decade. The prominent crypto exchange was hacked in 2014, which led to 850,000 bitcoin (BTC), worth nearly $23 billion at current prices, being stolen. The exchange managed to recover around 20% of the tokens after the hack.

Bitcoin struggled to gather upside traction even after defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox pushed out its pending bankruptcy repayments by a year, delaying the return of extra supply to the market. Some analysts, including those at UBS, had warned the repayments could cause an increase in BTC's active supply, leading to price weakness. The assumption was that creditors would quickly liquidate their holdings, having waited for nearly a decade, adding to supply. The crypto market depth has deteriorated significantly since the collapse of FTX, which means a few large sell orders can have an outsized negative impact on prices.

IMX, the native token of non-fungible tokens platform ImmutableX, surged on Thursday, led by South Korean traders. The cryptocurrency rose 35% to 74 cents during Asian trading hours, CoinDesk data show. Major cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), XRP and BNB traded 0.5% to 1% lower. The IMX price rally is accompanied by an over 22% increase in the 24-hour global trading volume, which rose to $556 million. The IMX-Korean won (IMX/KRW) pair listed on South Korea's Upbit exchange accounted for nearly 20% of the global activity, followed by Binance's IMX-tether (IMX/USDT) pair, which contributed 7% to the total volume, according to data source Coingecko.

- Omkar Godbole