This man held the private keys to $200M+ and died without telling anyone

Gerald Cotten was the founder of QuadrigaCX, once the biggest crypto exchange in Canada
He built it into a go-to platform for buying and selling Bitcoin, especially for Canadians
But he kept everything under his control, In 2018, he suddenly died while on honeymoon in India
That’s when everything started falling apart, He was the only one with access to the exchange wallets, No shared keys, no backup access, nothing
So when he died, users couldn’t withdraw their funds, Over $200M+ was stuck and around 100,000+ people were affected
At first, it looked like a tragic accident, But when investigators looked deeper some things didn’t add up
The so called “cold wallets” that were supposed to hold user funds were empty and they had been empty months before he died
Meaning the money was already gone, Turns out he had been using customer funds for his own trades and covering losses like it was his personal account
Some of it even went into luxury spending, there was no hack, Just mismanagement and fraud from the inside
When everything collapsed, only about $40M+ was recovered, Users got back around 13% of what they had, The rest disappeared
One man had full control and when he was gone, so was the money
Not your keys, not your coins 💀