At the end of 2025, Mark Karpelès, former CEO of Mt. Gox, a quieter life in Japan where he is building a VPN and an AI automation platform. As Chief Protocol Officer at vp.net – a VPN that uses Intel’s SGX technology to let users verify exactly what code is running on servers – he works with Roger Ver and Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access. “It’s the only VPN that you can basically trust. You don’t have to trust it, in fact you can verify”. At shells.com, his personal cloud computing platform, he is quietly developing an unreleased AI agent system that gives artificial intelligence full control over a virtual machine: installing software, managing emails, and even handling purchases with scheduled credit card integration. “What I’m doing with shells is giving the AI a whole computer and free rein on the computer”, really a brilliant idea. AI agents on steroids.
The contrast to his past could not be greater. 15 years ago, Karpelès was the reluctant king of the Bitcoin trading world, running Mt. Gox at a time when the exchange processed the vast majority of global bitcoin trades.
His journey began innocently enough in 2010. Karpelès, who runs a web hosting company called Tibanne under the Kalyhost brand, received a request from a French customer based in Peru who was frustrated by international payment barriers. “He is the one who discovered Bitcoin and asked me if he could use Bitcoin to pay for my services… I was probably one of the first companies to implement Bitcoin payments back in 2010”.
Roger Ver, an early evangelist, became a frequent visitor to Karpelès’ office. Unwittingly, his servers also hosted a domain linked to Silk Road – silkroadmarket.org – bought anonymously with bitcoin. That connection would later trigger the investigation: the American authorities briefly suspected Karpelès of being the feared pirate Roberts himself. “That was actually one of the main arguments for me being investigated by US law enforcement as maybe the guy behind the Silk Road… They thought I was the dreaded pirate Roberts”. The association complicated public perception and even appeared in Ross Ulbricht’s trial, where Ulbricht’s defense efforts, according to Karpelès, briefly attempted to cast doubt by linking Karpelès to the marketplace.
In 2011, Karpelès acquired Mt. Gox from Jed McCaleb, who went on to found Ripple and Stellar. The handover was tainted from the start. “Between the time I signed the contract and the time I got access to the server, 80,000 bitcoins were stolen… Jed was adamant that we couldn’t tell the users about it,” Karpelès claimed to Bitcoin Magazine. McCaleb faced no criminal liability for the Mt. Gox case, although he has been sued civilly and has been part of the public discourse surrounding the case. Nevertheless, as far as Karpelès was concerned, he inherited a platform plagued by bad code and technical issues.
Mt. Gox exploded in popularity and became the primary entry ramp for millions getting into Bitcoin. Karpelès maintained strict policies that banned users linked to illegal activities such as drug buying on the Silk Road. “If you want to buy drugs with Bitcoin, in a country where drugs are illegal, you shouldn’t,” Karpelès told Bitcoin Magazine.
Mt. Gox empire crumbled in 2014 when hacks – later linked to Alexander Vinnik and the BTC-e exchange – drained over 650,000 bitcoins. Vinnik pleaded guilty in the United States, but was exchanged in a prisoner swap and returned to Russia without a trial, leaving evidence sealed. “It doesn’t feel like justice has been served,” Karpelès said, a moment that makes you wonder about Vinnik’s strange political value to the Russians. The 650,000 stolen bitcoins are still at large.
The fallout was swift. Karpelès was arrested in August 2015 and endured eleven and a half months in Japanese custody – a system notorious for its rigidity and psychological pressure. Early detention mixed him up with colorful cellmates: Yakuza members, drug dealers, swindlers. He spent the time teaching English, and the inmates quickly dubbed him “Mr. Bitcoin” after seeing blank headlines about him in newspapers given to them by prison officers. A Yakuza even tried to recruit him and slipped a phone number for contact after the release. “… Of course I won’t call it,” laughed Karpelès.
The psychological tactics were brutal. Japanese police used repeated re-arrests: after 23 days, prisoners were led to believe release was imminent, only to face a new warrant at the door. “They really make you think you’re free, and yes, no, no, you’re not free… It’s actually quite a lot in terms of mental health”.
Transferred to Tokyo’s detention center, conditions worsened: over six months in solitary confinement on a floor shared with death row inmates. “It’s still quite painful to spend more than six months in solitary confinement,” he recalled. Banned from letters or visits if he claimed innocence, he coped by re-reading books and writing stories – “what I wrote is really rubbish. I wouldn’t show it to anyone,” he said when asked if he would ever publish his writings. Armed with 20,000 pages of financial statements and a basic calculator bought for his case, he settled charges of embezzlement by uncovering $5 million in unreported income in the stock market.
Paradoxically, prison dramatically improved his health. Chronic sleep deprivation — often just two hours a night during his workaholic Mount Gox days — gave way to regular rest. “Sleeping at night helps a lot… when I’m working, I’m used to sleeping only two hours a night, which is a very, very bad habit” (00:22:18). After being physically transformed — “disintegrated,” as observers noted at the time — he surprised the Bitcoin community with fresh photos showing peak condition.
Karpelès was released on bail after denying major charges, and Karpelès was only convicted of minor record falsification at the end of the ordeal. The Silk Road connections had complicated perceptions, with Ross Ulbricht’s defense briefly trying to implicate him to create plausible deniability for Ulbricht. Public narratives often painted him as complicit in Bitcoin’s dark side, despite his policies against it.
Rumors swirled in 2016 of vast personal fortunes from Mt. Gox’s remaining assets – once estimated at hundreds of millions or even billions due to Bitcoin’s price rise. Yet Karpelès says he receives nothing. The bankruptcy’s pivot to civil rehabilitation allowed creditors to claim in bitcoins and distribute the value proportionally. I like to use technology to solve problems and then I don’t even do any kind of investment or anything like that because I like to make money by constructing things. To just get a payout for something that is basically a failure for me would feel very wrong, and at the same time I want the customers to get the money as much as possible.” Creditors, many now receiving far more in dollars due to Bitcoin’s rise, continue to wait.
Today, Karpelès partners with Roger Ver—the early visitor turned business partner—who recently settled US tax claims for nearly $50 million. “I’m happy for him that he’s finally getting things cleared up,” Karpelès said.
Today, Karpelès says he does not own bitcoin personally, although his companies accept it as a form of payment. Discussing the current state of Bitcoin, he criticized centralization risks in ETFs and figures such as Michael Saylor: “This is a recipe for disaster… I like to believe in crypto in math and different things, but I don’t believe in people”. On FTX: “They ran accounting on QuickBooks for a potentially multi-billion dollar company, which is crazy”.
From the epicenter of Bitcoin—hosting Silk Road connections, onboarding the world, enduring Japan’s harshest detention—to building verifiable tools to protect personal information, Karpelès’ arc reflects the maturation of the industry. His story marks Bitcoin’s first roar into mainstream culture, a time when his leadership as CEO of Mt. Gox placed him at the center of the storm. Most clearly, his construction mindset remains a prime example of the type of engineer and entrepreneur who were attracted to Bitcoin in the early days.