Mt. Gox the world’s largest Bitcoin trading exchange. has reopened US dollar withdrawals on its service after suspending the option two weeks ago in order to make upgrades to its system.
The Japan-headquartered company made the changes in order to enable its fast-growing platform to process a higher volume of payments. Over the past two weeks, Mt. Gox says it has managed to process more than $1 million in payments to customers without problems, and it is confident that the changes will represent a marked improvement for its customers.
“[It’s] not a perfect solution, we are quite happy with the progress made despite the conditions,” it said in an announcement.
The firm has been under investigation in the US, after the Feds seized Dwolla’s payments to and from the service in May for conducting “unlicensed money transmitting” — although the company did not reveal if the temporary dollar suspension was related to a government demand or probe.
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In addition to beefing up its platform, the company says it has forged “several” new partnerships with banks in its native Japan and across the country. For now, Mt. Gox is not revealing names but it says that more partners will hop on board soon to help stabilize the platform and provide more options for customers.
Understandably the company is getting through a two-week backlog due to the closure, but it says it will be back to normal in the next few weeks.
“We…are proud to be one of the first advocates and entrepreneurs in this growing ecosystem, but much still needs to be accomplished to bring trust and stability to a mass market,” the company said, perhaps in reference to reports that it has registered as a money service with the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and reports it is under investigation.
We reached out to Mt. Gox over the weekend and were told “an official announcement will be made once our company is registered with US government”.
As the top Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox has come under a lot of pressure as the popularity of Bitcoin has surged. In addition to bearing the strain of larger volumes of transactions, the company has suffered a number of DDoS attacks and was forced to halt trading in April following a major Bitcoin price crash.
Headline image zcopley / Flickr
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