There is a story I can't stop thinking about: the case of Gerald Cotten and QuadrigaCX.

It sounds like fiction, but it's real.

Cotten was the founder of Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange, and for years he operated as if it were legitimate.
But the reality was quite different.
The guy was running a massive Ponzi scheme, losing millions of clients' funds on reckless bets while maintaining an absurdly luxurious lifestyle financed with money that wasn't his.

And here comes the part that makes people paranoid: in 2018, Gerald Cotten mysteriously died in India.
But he was the ONLY one with access to the cold wallets holding $250 million in customer funds.
Just think about that.
No one else had the password.
No one else could access anything.
Many people started to theorize that he simply faked his death to disappear with the money.

When they investigated later, they found that Cotten had a history of fraud since he was 15, involvement with pyramid schemes, and even co-founded a money laundering website before QuadrigaCX.
In other words, the pattern was clear.

His wife, Jennifer Robertson, also became a suspect for delaying the announcement of his death and then settling a large financial deal.
That only fueled conspiracy theories further.

In the end, they managed to recover only a small fraction of the funds.
The rest? It disappeared.

The Netflix documentary 'Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King' tells this entire story.
It's worth watching to better understand the scale of the chaos.

Gerald Cotten's case became a huge warning about what can happen when the cryptocurrency sector operates without proper regulation.
No structure, no backup, no contingency plan.
Just one person with total access and no accountability.

That's why regulation matters.
This kind of thing shouldn't be possible.