The man who took $190 million to the grave THE MAN WHO TOOK $190 MILLION TO THE GRAVE. On December 9, 2018, a 30 year old Canadian named Gerald Cotten died in a hospital in Jaipur, India. He was on his honeymoon, he had Crohn's disease, and the complications killed him in a matter of days. A statement of death was filed back home in Halifax three days later. He was also the founder and sole director of QuadrigaCX, the largest crypto exchange in Canada, and he ran the entire company from one encrypted laptop. His death was announced a month later. At that point 115,000 customers learned that around 250 million Canadian dollars of their money sat in cold wallets, and the only person who knew the passwords was in a grave in Nova Scotia. Then the details started arriving. He had signed his will twelve days before he died. Creditors asked the police to exhume the body and confirm it was really him. The internet decided he had faked his own death and moved to Belize. All of it missed the point. In March 2019, auditors finally identified six of the cold wallets. Every one was empty, and they had been drained in April 2018, eight months before he ever boarded that plane. The Ontario Securities Commission later ruled that Quadriga was a fraud and Cotten had run it as a Ponzi scheme. Customers lost about 169 million dollars.