I still remember when I discovered the story of Gerald Cotten. It’s one of those cases that leaves you speechless, the kind of story you never forget in the crypto world.

So, it’s late 2018. Gerald Cotten, CEO of Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX, is on his honeymoon in India with his wife Jennifer Robertson. Young, charismatic, everything the crypto world idealizes. Then, on December 9th, at only 30 years old, he dies in a Jaipur hospital from Crohn’s complications. A personal tragedy, or so it seems.

A few days later, QuadrigaCX collapses. And that’s when the real nightmare begins. Gerald Cotten was the only — I repeat, THE ONLY — person with access to the cold wallets holding over $250 million in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies belonging to 115,000 clients. No backups. No shared passwords. No emergency protocols. It’s as if he built a safe and then threw the key into a well.

The crypto community went crazy. Theories started circulating: what if Cotten wasn’t really dead? What if it was all a plan? Investigators dug and found strange things. Fund movements before his death. The hospital was private. The death certificate was incomplete. Devastated clients began demanding exhumation of the body. Experts suggest that Gerald Cotten might have used mixers, tax havens, offshore wallets to hide everything.

Netflix made a documentary raising the question that still remains unanswered today: where is the money? And where is Gerald Cotten really?

This story teaches me one fundamental thing. In crypto, a single person can be simultaneously the central bank, the safe, and the thief. It’s the risk of centralizing everything in one individual. QuadrigaCX has become a monument to this fragility. And every time I see exchanges with opaque governance or keys managed by individuals, I think of Gerald Cotten and those 115,000 clients who never saw their funds again.