The man at least partly responsible for the tightening of cryptocurrency regulation in Japan complains that the rules in the country are now too onerous as he tries in vain to return to a market very much a product of his own earlier undoing.

“It’s very difficult to create a crypto exchange,” Mark Karpeles, CEO of Karpeles Lab, said recently at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in speaking about the state of the business in the country.

“From what I hear from people inside the industry, being a crypto exchange in Japan is not profitable. Most crypto exchanges in Japan are losing money because of the regulations, because they cannot innovate,” the former CEO of Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based crypto exchange created in 2010, added.