Mt. Gox's Mark Karpeles: I Was Suspected Of Being Dread Pirate Roberts

"In late 2025, Mark Karpelès, ex CEO of Mt. Gox, lives a quieter life in Japan, 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 runs on servers-he works alongside Roger Ver and Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access. "It's the only VPN that you can trust basically. You don't need to trust it, actually, you can verify"."

"At shells.com, his personal cloud computing platform, he's quietly developing an unreleased AI agent system that hands artificial intelligence full control over a virtual machine: installing software, managing emails, and even handling purchases with a planned credit card integration. "What I'm doing with shells is giving AI a whole computer and free rein on the computer", a brilliant idea, really. AI agents on steroids."

"His journey began innocently enough in 2010. Operating a web hosting company called Tibanne under the brand Kalyhost, Karpelès received a request from a French customer based in Peru who was frustrated with international payment hurdles. "He's 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"."

Mark Karpelès lives in Japan and leads vp.net, a VPN using Intel SGX to allow users to verify exactly what code runs on servers while collaborating with Roger Ver and Andrew Lee. He operates shells.com, a personal cloud platform where he is building an unreleased AI agent system that grants artificial intelligence full control of a virtual machine to install software, manage emails, and handle purchases with planned credit-card integration. The vp.net design emphasizes verifiability so users need not trust operators. Fifteen years earlier he ran Mt. Gox when it processed most global bitcoin trades, and he began accepting bitcoin payments in 2010 through his hosting company Tibanne.

Read at Bitcoin Magazine