Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of Mt Gox, is returning to the crypto industry with EllipX

Backed by Edip Nezir, an investor based in Dubai, it has 17,000 users mainly in Europe but is hoping to expand elsewhere, Karpelès, who is French but still based in Japan, said.

Mark Karpelès, the former head of bankrupt crypto exchange Mt Gox, is returning to the industry with a new venture — a crypto exchange in Poland that is touting its security and transparency features.

Backed by Dubai-based investor Edip Nezir, EllipX has 17,000 users mainly in Europe but is hoping to expand elsewhere, said Karpelès, who is French but still based in Japan.

This includes the UK, where EllipX is seeking approval from the Financial Conduct Authority, the City regulator, which requires crypto companies that want to offer services in Britain to meet anti-money laundering rules and register with it. The FCA did not comment.

Karpelès said he had “quite a few” regrets about Mt Gox, adding: “I wish I could have done better.”

However, the disaster was not proving to be an obstacle to building a new exchange, he argued. “A lot of customers who know about Mt Gox actually find it interesting to see what kind of solutions I come up with to restore trust.”

He said he had developed EllipX because security and transparency in the crypto industry, which were lacking when he ran Mt Gox, were still not widespread.

The Mt Gox disaster was one of the first big crises to hit the crypto market, which was created with the launch of bitcoin in 2009. At one point the exchange accounted for 80 per cent of all bitcoin trades and its subsequent failure sent shock waves through the industry. Two Russians were charged in 2023 by the US Department of Justice with conspiring to launder 647,000 bitcoins hacked from Mt Gox in 2011, which was the same year that Karpelès acquired the exchange.

The implosion of Mt Gox led to Karpelès being arrested in 2015 and spending almost a year in custody in Japan before being released on bail. He said that while in detention he was allowed to purchase a simple calculator, which he used to sift through 20,000 pages of evidence, including 5,000 pages of accounting records, and begin building a defence.

While he was found not guilty of the more serious charges he faced, the Tokyo district court concluded that Karpelès had caused “massive harm to the trust of his users” by falsifying records.