Крах QuadrigaCX: как смерть одного человека раскрыла самую темную тайну криптовалюты

Gerald Cotten looked like every aspiring crypto entrepreneur’s dream—charismatic, driven, building a platform that promised to democratize digital assets. QuadrigaCX became Canada’s largest crypto exchange, with tens of thousands of users trusting him with their life savings.

Then he died in India in December 2019. And everything fell apart.

Here’s where it gets dark: Cotten was the sole custodian of the private keys securing $190 million in customer funds. When he went down, those digital wallets became cryptographic tombs. Over 76,000 people couldn’t access their money. Period.

But the real scandal emerged during the investigation.

Cotten wasn’t just negligent—he was running a full-scale Ponzi scheme. Investigators discovered he’d been:

• Siphoning customer deposits into personal accounts
• Funding a lavish lifestyle (luxury yachts, designer properties, globe-trotting)
• Creating fake trading accounts and wash-trading with real customer money
• Covering losses by pulling from new deposits

It was a house of cards built on lies. When regulators finally audited the exchange post-mortem, they found barely anything left.

The lesson? This wasn’t about one bad actor—it exposed a fundamental vulnerability in early crypto: centralized exchanges + single points of failure + zero regulatory oversight = disaster waiting to happen.

QuadrigaCX became the cautionary tale that shaped how the industry thinks about security, custody, and governance today. For those 76,000 people, it was just heartbreak.