Things have gotten increasingly messy this year for Mt. Gox, Bitcoin's largest exchange. There was the whole currency crash in April followed quickly by a DDoS attack directed at the exchange. Next came the US government stepping in to seize Mt. Gox funds from Dwolla, a mobile payment service. And in late June as that investigation continued, Mt. Gox flat-out suspended US-based withdrawals as the volume of transactions continually overwhelmed the site.

Today, the site tried to offer followers some positive news. Mt. Gox announced "Midas," a new engine that supposedly benchmarks at more than 500,000 trades per second. Mt. Gox even claims Midas "is capable of much more than that." While no firm rollout date was given with the announcement, Mt. Gox indicated that Midas will be deployed soon "after a couple of hardware updates."

Mt. Gox also said it is now partnering with Akamai, the content delivery network, while simultaneously taking more control over its own infrastructure. Mt. Gox explains:

Mt. Gox is now proud to be supported by Akamai, meaning that mtgox.com is hosted on thousands of servers all around the world, connecting our customers at their local level. Not only does this massively increase our protection, but since the transition the performance and speed of mtgox.com has been greatly improved. Both factors are very important for the next few items. Structurally we've moved from being a hosted service to being entirely self-hosted, meaning that we have much more flexibility in what we want to do and have full control of our data center. This is a major step up for Mt. Gox in our evolution.

The exchange lumped a few additional notices in with the Midas and Akamai news. On the pro- side, Mt. Gox is toying with new user interfaces to make the customer experience smoother. On the con- side, the Litecoin support delayed by those DDoS attacks is still a ways off (without much information as to why):

We hate to apologize yet again for the delay in implementing Litecoin, but the fact of the matter is that it depends on a variety of factors, including completing all of the above before we launch. We're looking forward to the rollout, but at this point are reluctant to speculate on when. We are sorry to keep Litecoin enthusiasts hanging.

And despite increasing speeds for trade on the horizon, getting money to and from Mt. Gox itself remains slow. "It currently takes up to 10 days to process a deposit because our bank, upon receiving deposits, notifies us of the deposit but holds them for seven to 10 days before transferring them to our account," the exchange revealed. "This has always been the case, and we were still crediting customer accounts before receiving the funds ourselves, but some cases in which the bank subsequently rejected the deposits meant that we incurred significant losses. The risk is now too high for us to credit accounts prematurely." In other words, the act of transitioning from real world cash to digital world bitcoins through Mt. Gox may be slower than ever.