From Failed Bitcoin Exchange to Forever Web Hosting
Mark Karpelès, former CEO of the collapsed Bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, has shifted his attention to the web hosting industry. Mt Gox, was based in Tokyo, Japan, and was the world’s oldest bitcoin exchange. It collapsed, filling for bankruptcy in February of this year, after the supposed theft of about 850,000 BTC, valued at more than $450 Million at the time. However, 200,000 BTC was later discovered in an outdated wallet bringing the total down to 650,000 BTC. Cases have been made against Karpelès for theft and fraud, and he is still under investigation.
Now looking towards his next endeavor, Karpelès has launched a new web hosting service called Forever.net. This site is registered under both his name and Mt Gox’s parent company, Tibanne. There is a press release on the site announcing the launch of their Dedicated Server and VPS Hosting Services as July of this year. Forever.net currently offers transit, Dedicated and VPS hosting as well as VoIP services, with built-to-order services.
On the Forever.net website, it reads, “TIBANNE Co.Ltd. is a Tokyo, Japan-based corporation founded in 2009 by talented technopreneurs. TIBANNE specializes in web hosting, IP transit, VoIP, software development and network administration. We are currently engaged in the reserch and development of new and existing services to produce innovative solutions for our clients.”
Karpelès, in an email correspondence with Eric Calouro at NewsBtc.com tried to keep the focus on the new services and not the Bitcoin scandal stating, “unlike other subjects, I am able to discuss Forever.net.” However he did mention that he too was also deeply affected by the closure. “Now with what happened with [Mt. Gox], not only Tibanne has a loss of revenue (losing our biggest customer and all of Tibanne’s bitcoins) but also an increase in legal costs, not mentioning being able to do our part in the MtGox bankruptcy process. As such we are now controlling expenses and focusing on revenue generating in order to be able to do our part.”
He explained that this is not his first foray into the web hosting industry stating, “First, Tibanne’s specialty is providing hosting services. We’ve been doing this since 2009, and even before founding Tibanne I help founding a couple other hosting companies (one still has its site online, however the offers listed on there are far outdated, not sure what they are doing today.”
Karpeles said Forever.net will offer cluster-backed VPS servers with equivalent of RAID1 on top of RAID 5 physical storage with hot spare drives on standby.
As of yet Forever.net is not accepting bitcoin as a payment option. Nevertheless, this may be an option in the future as Karpelès stated, “We are also considering accepting payments in BTC/LTC/etc. For information[,] Tibanne’s other hosting service KalyHost.com has been accepting BTC since Sept. 2010 and generated since then a total revenue of over 13000 bitcoins (we will soon be releasing a new version of the KalyHost.com website too).”
Tibanne will also be releasing a new version of KalyHost.com in the near future.
