TOKYO: Mark Karpeles, the former high-flying creator of the MtGox bitcoin exchange, on Friday received a suspended jail sentence of two and a half years in a Japanese court.
The court suspended the sentence for four years for the 33-year-old Frenchman who has claimed his innocence throughout the proceedings.
According to local media, he was found not guilty of embezzlement but guilty of manipulation of computer data at the MtGox exchange, which at one point claimed to be handling around 80 percent of all global bitcoin transactions.
MtGox was shut down in 2014 after 850,000 bitcoins (worth half a billion dollars at that time) disappeared from its virtual vaults, a mystery that remains unsolved.
The disappearance left a trail of angry investors, rocked the virtual currency community, and dented confidence in the security of bitcoin.
ric/qan