CEO dies, crypto exchange may have lost $145 m

Toronto/New York, February 6

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One of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges has been granted bankruptcy protection after its 30-year-old founder died unexpectedly in India, taking with him passwords of tens of thousands of customers who are unable to access $145 million in funds.

Quadriga said it was unable to gain access to Canadian dollar 190 million ($145 million) of Bitcoin and other digital assets after Gerald Cotten, its CEO and co-founder, died in December. He died of complications arising from Crohn’s Disease, an inflammatory bowel ailment, while volunteering at an orphanage in India.

Many of the digital currencies held by Quadriga are stored offline in accounts known as “cold wallets”, a way of protecting them from hackers. Cotten was the only person with access to the wallets, according to the company.

Cotten’s sudden death has plunged Quadriga into a crisis and left it struggling to figure out how to refund more than 100,000 of its users, CNN reported. Cotten’s widow, Jennifer Robertson, described people posting inaccurate speculation on social media about “whether he is really dead”. “I do not know the password or recovery key,” she said. “Despite repeated and diligent searches, I have not been able to find them written down anywhere,” she said.

The company has hired experts in an attempt to hack into Cotten’s laptop and other devices to retrieve the missing cryptocurrencies, but Robertson warned that at least some of them “may be lost”. The company had 363,000 registered users, of which 92,000 have account balances. Cotten was the sole officer and director. — PTI