Years ago, there was a case that marked the entire crypto community and still sparks debates. I’ll tell you why it’s one of those moments that shouldn’t be repeated.

It was 2018. Gerald Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, one of Canada's largest exchanges, was on top. Young, billionaire, charismatic. He had just gotten married and went on his honeymoon to India with his wife Jennifer Robertson. Life seemed perfect.

But on December 9th, everything changed. Cotten died in a Jaipur hospital at age 30 due to Crohn’s complications. Tragic, no doubt. What came after was the real disaster.

A few days after his death, QuadrigaCX simply disappeared. And here’s the absurd part: Gerald Cotten was the only person with access to the cold wallets where over $250 million in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were stored. 115,000 customers were left without access to anything. No backups. No shared passwords. No emergency protocols. Nothing.

What happened next was chaotic. Investigators started finding strange things. Fund movements between personal and company wallets before his death. The death certificate was incomplete. Desperate customers demanded the exhumation of the body, claiming it was all a fraud. Experts speculated about mixers, tax havens, offshore wallets. Crypto paranoia reached its peak: what if Gerald Cotten wasn’t really dead?

Netflix made a documentary about this. The question persists: where is the money? Where is Gerald?

The lesson is brutal and still relevant today. In crypto, a single individual can be simultaneously a central bank, a safe, and potentially a thief. QuadrigaCX became the symbol of why centralization in crypto is an existential risk. That’s why today we see so much emphasis on custody solutions, multi-sig wallets, and transparency in exchanges. Gerald Cotten’s case taught us the hard way what must never happen again.