When Gerald Cotten died suddenly in Jaipur, India on December 9th, 2018, his exchange QuadrigaCX told about 115,000 customers that 250 million Canadian dollars was locked in cold wallets on his encrypted laptop, and that only he had known the password. This episode traces how he got there. Born in May 1988 and raised in Belleville, Ontario, Cotten graduated from York University’s Schulich School of Business in 2010. His real training came earlier, as a teenager on a forum called TalkGold, where he promoted high yield investment programs that paid old investors with new deposits.

He co-founded Quadriga in Vancouver in November 2013 with Michael Patryn, an associate from those forum days. By 2016 every other director had resigned, leaving Cotten running the exchange alone from his home in Fall River, Nova Scotia, with no offices, no corporate bank accounts, and shadowy payment processors moving customer cash. In 2017 the platform handled 1.2 billion Canadian dollars in trades. Auditors later found that the vault everyone was waiting to unlock had been empty for months.

• In a 2014 interview Cotten said client funds were kept on paper wallets, printed keys locked in a bank safe deposit box.
• Michael Patryn was later revealed to be Omar Dhanani, who had served 18 months in a US federal prison for identity theft before being deported to Canada.
• Twelve days before he died, Cotten signed a will leaving a 9.6 million dollar estate to his widow, including a 100,000 dollar trust for his two chihuahuas.
• Ernst and Young found the main cold wallets had held no significant cryptocurrency since April 2018, eight months before the trip to India.
• The Ontario Securities Commission concluded Cotten credited alias accounts with fake funds to buy real Bitcoin from customers, and victims received an interim 13 cents on the dollar in March 2023.