Years ago, I learned a story I never stopped thinking about. A young guy, a crypto millionaire, traveling to India with his wife on their honeymoon. He seemed to have it all. But on December 9, 2018, at 30 years old, he died in Jaipur from Crohn's complications. Tragic, right? Except what came after was even more disturbing.

The name was Gerald Cotten. He was the CEO of QuadrigaCX, one of Canada's largest exchanges. And here’s the important part: he was the only one with access to the cold wallets where they stored over $250 million in crypto. Of 115,000 clients. No backups. No shared passwords. Nothing.

A few days after Gerald Cotten died, the exchange collapsed. It literally disappeared. Customers couldn’t access anything. Total chaos.

But the strange part begins afterward. Investigators noticed strange things: asset movements between personal and company wallets before he died, the hospital where he supposedly died was private, the death certificate was incomplete. People started to speculate. What if Gerald wasn’t dead? What if it was all a plan?

The devastated clients demanded the exhumation of the body. There were theories about mixers, tax havens, offshore wallets. Netflix eventually made a documentary about this because the question no one could answer was: where is the money? And where is Gerald Cotten really?

What I took away from all this is a dark lesson about how crypto works. A single person can be the central bank, the safe, and the thief all at the same time. QuadrigaCX became a warning synonym. In the crypto ecosystem, that’s what it represents today: what can go wrong when there are no checks and balances, when everything depends on one person. It’s a reminder of why decentralization matters.