The CEO Who Took $190 Million to His Grave

The Exchange

QuadrigaCX was Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Founded in 2013 by Gerald Cotten and Michael Patryn, it processed hundreds of millions of dollars in trades and served over 350,000 customers. For years, it operated as one of the few legitimate-seeming on-ramps for Canadians wanting to buy Bitcoin.

Behind the scenes, the exchange had a critical flaw: Gerald Cotten was the sole custodian of the cold wallet private keys. There was no backup holder, no multi-signature arrangement, no dead man’s switch. Every dollar of customer cryptocurrency sat behind a single point of failure — one man’s laptop.

The Death

In December 2018, Cotten travelled to Jaipur, India, where he was reportedly working on an orphanage project. On 9 December, he died in a local hospital. The official cause was complications from Crohn’s disease. He was 30 years old.

His widow, Jennifer Robertson, announced his death weeks later in a sworn affidavit filed with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court. She stated that Cotten had been the only person with access to the exchange’s cold storage wallets, and that she had been unable to locate his passwords or recovery phrases despite searching his home and devices.

Approximately $190 million in customer funds — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and other cryptocurrencies — became permanently inaccessible.

The Investigation

What followed was one of the most extraordinary investigations in cryptocurrency history. Ernst & Young was appointed as the bankruptcy trustee and began tracing the flow of funds. What they discovered was far worse than negligence.

Cotten had been operating QuadrigaCX as something resembling a Ponzi scheme for years. He created fake accounts on the platform under aliases and used them to generate fictitious trades. Customer deposits were commingled with his personal funds. Significant amounts of cryptocurrency had been moved to other exchanges and converted to cash. The cold wallets that were supposed to hold customer funds were largely empty — not because the keys were lost, but because the money had already been spent.

The Ontario Securities Commission later concluded that QuadrigaCX was a fraud from at least 2016 onward. Cotten had personally misappropriated approximately $169 million in customer assets.

The Conspiracy Theories

Cotten’s death in India, combined with the discovery of fraud, fuelled intense speculation. Some customers questioned whether he had actually died at all. The circumstances were unusual: he died in a country where document fraud is not uncommon, was cremated quickly, and his death certificate contained a misspelling of his name.

In 2019, a group of affected customers formally requested that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police exhume his body to confirm his identity. Netflix later produced a documentary exploring the case. No exhumation has taken place.

Whether Cotten is genuinely dead or not, the outcome for customers is the same. The vast majority of the $190 million has never been recovered. Ernst & Young managed to claw back some assets from his estate, including property and a yacht, but the total recovered represents a fraction of what was owed.

Lessons

The QuadrigaCX case illustrates why “not your keys, not your coins” became a foundational principle of cryptocurrency. Customers trusted an exchange with their funds, and that trust was catastrophically misplaced.

But the case also illustrates a subtler point about inheritance and key management. Even if Cotten had been running the exchange honestly, the outcome would have been the same: a single person holding all the keys, with no succession plan, meant that death equalled permanent loss.

For anyone holding cryptocurrency — whether on behalf of customers or for yourself — key management is not optional. Redundancy is not paranoia. And relying on a single individual, no matter how trusted, is a design flaw that death will eventually expose.

“He took his keys to the grave. Whether he meant to is the question nobody can answer.”

Related Reading

• What Happens to Bitcoin When You Die? — The core problem Cotten’s case demonstrates in the extreme.
• Bitcoin Probate in the UK — What executors face when crypto holders die without a plan.
• Multi-Sig Inheritance Explained — How multi-sig prevents single-person key dependency.
• Mt. Gox: 850,000 BTC Vanished — Another catastrophic exchange failure, different cause, same lesson.
• Matthew Mellon: $1B in Crypto, No Clear Plan — A personal fortune lost to the same single-key problem.