Death of bitcoin trading platform owner locks out USD 190 million

Source: Radio 021 Tuesday, 05.02.2019. 11:49
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QuadrigaCX, the largest bitcoin exchange in Canada, has lost USD 190 million worth of crypto after it lost access to its cold storage wallets.

An affidavit filed on January 31 with the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia revealed that USD 190 million in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Cash SV, Bitcoin Gold, Litecoin, and Ethereum were lost, the CNN writes.

The affidavit, first obtained by CoinDesk, was filed by Jennifer Robertson, the widow of QuadrigaCX founder and CEO Gerald Cotten.

According to a death certificate included in the affidavit, Cotten passed away in India after suffering from Crohn’s disease. The death of Gerald Cotten was disclosed by the exchange in early January.
Jennifer Robertson stated that Cotten was solely in control of storing user funds in cold storage wallets. In crypto, cold storage refers to a wallet that is not connected to the internet and stored offline.

Usually, major digital asset exchanges like Binance and Coinbase store a large portion of their funds in cold storage to prevent hacking attacks and security breaches.

However, there is often an infrastructure in place in the form of a multi-signature system to ensure that the exchange can still withdraw funds under the most unlikely circumstances.


In the case of QuadrigaCX, the founder and CEO was solely responsible for overseeing the funds, and since he passed away, no one could access the funds that he previously maintained.

Robertson has hired a consultant to attempt to decrypt the laptop utilized by Cotten to potentially gain access to the private keys to the cold storage wallets that kept QuadricaCX’s user funds.

The consultant has not found success in obtaining access to the laptop, and to date, the exchange has not been able to recover any of the funds that were lost.
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