Widow details husband’s shady bitcoin exploits — and the millions that vanished with his mysterious death

When Gerald Cotten, the 30-year-old Canadian CEO of bitcoin exchange and investment platform QuadrigaCX, died suddenly in India in 2018, $250 million worth of cryptocurrency and cash vanished just as suddenly.

The bitcoin was supposedly held in Quadriga’s “cold wallet” — essentially stored offline on Cotten’s laptop — the passwords to which were known only to the deceased CEO. (And whose passwords were never recovered, despite the best efforts of forensic computer experts.)

It now appears, based on this confessional account by his widow, Jennifer Robertson (with an assist from University of King’s College journalism professor Stephen Kimber), that there weren’t any substantial investment assets — bitcoin or otherwise — in Quadriga. What Cotten ran was a high-tech version of an old-fashioned Ponzi…