Buisness Personality

head of QuadrigaCX: Gerald Cotten Wiki, Bio, Age, died, cause of death, Net worth, Family & More Facts

Gerald Cotten Wiki – Gerald Cotten Bio

The company’s CEO and founder, Gerald William Cotten [11 May 1988 – 9 December 2018], died unexpectedly in December 2018, after traveling to India. Up to C$250 million (US$190 million) owed to 115,000 customers were missing or could not be accessed because only Gerald Cotten held the password to off-line cold wallets.

Quadriga Fintech Solutions was the owner and operator of QuadrigaCX, which was believed to be Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. In 2019 the exchange ceased operations and the company was declared bankrupt with C$215.7 million in liabilities and about C$28 million in assets.

Quadriga likely never invested the funds entrusted to it, according to Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency tracking firm. Either the funds were never received or quickly went missing. “What Quadriga really did with the money that customers gave it to buy Bitcoin remains a mystery,” according to Chainalysis.

Ernst & Young was appointed as an independent monitor while Quadriga was granted temporary legal protection from its creditors under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act. On 8 April 2019 the firm entered bankruptcy under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act as the possibility of a successful reorganization appeared to be remote.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were reportedly investigating the company.

Gerald Cotten Cause of Death

The official cause of death was ‘complications from Crohn’s disease.’

His corpse was sent back to the Oberoi and then sent to be embalmed. But the embalmer refused to work on the body and it went back to the hotel before being taken to a local hospital.

Robertson then traveled back to Canada with the body.

The official narrative surrounding his death said that Cotten fell ill shortly after he and Robertson checked into the $770-a-night Oberoi Rajvilas in Jaipur on December 8.

He was ferried to a private hospital and told he had acute gastroenteritis. Cotten, who had Chron’s disease, died the next day.

Blood tests showed he had died of septic shock just over 24 hours after he first complained of stomachache.

Gerald Cotten Key Points To Know

  • Gerald Cotten, head of QuadrigaCX, died in December 2018 while in India
  • His death left $128million in cryptocurrency locked in the bank’s digital vaults and auditors dismantling the firm discovered that these vaults were empty 
  • Four days before Cotten died of gastroenteritis he wrote his will, leaving $9million in real estate, his cars, yacht and plane to his wife and family

New mystery surrounds a Bitcoin billionaire

A new mystery surrounds a Bitcoin billionaire who last year died on his honeymoon in India, months before auditors discovered that the $ 128 million he had stored in digital vaults had disappeared.

A new report at Vanity Fair asks if Canadian cryptocurrency pioneer Gerald Cotten is living in secret from an embezzled fortune and raises a series of questions about the circumstances of his death.

Cotten, 30, was the CEO of QuadricaCX, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Canada that he failed last year after his death abroad with his wife Jennifer Robertson.

In the months leading up to Cotten’s death, his company was falling apart quickly and wasting millions on risky bets in new currencies.

Ernst and Young Discovery of Millions Cryptocurrency

Ernst and Young’s auditors were to discover that the millions in cryptocurrency belonging to his clients – which had been stored on external hard-drives, known as cold wallets – had been emptied before he traveled to India.

Cotten’s will was written four days before his death on December 9, 2018. It detailed $9million in real estate, a Lexus, a Cessna plane and his yacht, the Gulliver.

Cotten’s name was also misspelled on his death certificate by the Rajasthan hospital, in a country where forged documents are easy to obtain, according to Vanity Fair.

Cryptocurrency Wallet Unknow Password

Cotten’s will did not mention the cold wallets. These are hard drives, not connected to the internet, which stored the cryptocurrency of his 75,000 clients and for which only he had the password.

The password, a long, virtually impossible to remember, set of random numbers and letters, was kept inside a safe bolted to the rafters of his attic.

EY, tasked by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court with accessing the cold wallets, was eventually able to access the drives in March, but revealed the currency had gone.

Gerald Cotten Case Investigations

Investigators found the wallets were commonly used to store Bitcoin starting in April 2014, but in April 2018 all but one of them were abruptly emptied and left dormant.

The final wallet was still used to transfer currency until December 3, six days before Cotten died, before it was also left empty.

Various theories have emerged about Cotten, the most compelling perhaps, claims that he is alive and living off the millions that went missing.