Earlier today news broke of an arrest in Greece of a Russian national suspected of running a large-scale money laundering operation focused on Bitcoin. The man has since been publicly identified as Alexander Vinnik, 38, and over $4 billion USD is said to have been trafficked through the operation since 2011. We won't beat around the bush with it: Vinnik is our chief suspect for involvement in the MtGox theft (or the laundering of the proceeds thereof). This is the result of years of patient work, and these findings were surely independently uncovered by other investigators as well. Everyone who worked on the case have patiently kept quiet while forwarding findings to law enforcement, so as not to tip suspects off and to maximize the chances of arrests. With such an arrest actually happening, we think today might — finally — be the day when we can begin talking about what we've actually been doing all this time and what we found. Thank you for your patience.

Recently the MtGox civil rehabilitation trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, announced a six month delay in proceedings due to disapproved claims still being disputed. The trustee doesn't refer to it directly, but the elephant in the room causing this delay is Peter Vessenes' CoinLab, who after a failed partnership attempt with MtGox in 2012/2013 is now demanding an outrageous $16B USD from the MtGox civil rehabilitation estate. There have been various theories floating around how CoinLab could possibly be justifying this number, with little insight into their actual arguments, a problem not helped by CoinLab's attempts to seal official Japanese creditor records in order to conceal their actions. Recently though I acquired a copy of the last round of petitions to the Tokyo District Court, and have spent the last week dredging through the legal Japanese to get to the bottom of the situation. DISCLAIMER: While I am more familiar with the underlying subject matter than most people, I