The Best Crypto Heist is to Fake your own Death

Cryptocurrency Exchanges can have the more bizarre security issues. Let's just say that the sudden death of the boss of a crypto exchange in India gets stranger by the day. O' Canada eh! Quadriga was Canada's biggest cryptoexchange!

Sure, the crypto winter has been harsh. But if you die as the only person to passwords to $190 million of crypto, people are going to start asking questions. It could be the most elaborate of frauds.

It's a really simple story of unbelievable facts with a rather dark conspiracy.

• Quadriga CEO Gerald Cotten died suddenly from complications related to Crohn's disease at the age of 30, the company said earlier this month.
• Cotten was the only person with the passwords to access about CAD$250 million ($188 million) worth of deposits held by customers.
• You got to listen to the Reddit kids sometimes: the sheer amount of missing funds, as well as several odd circumstances surrounding Cotten's death, have led to theories he faked his death in an elaborate scam to rob his customers.

No CEO doesn't have a plan, but his widow, Jennifer Robertson, said in an affidavit that he was the only one with Quadriga's passwords, meaning some 115,000 clients can't access their deposits.

• With a proper treatment plan, the risk of death from Crohn's disease is currently about 3%.
• Cotten's will was signed on November 27, less than two weeks before his death on December 9.

The chance that this is a staged death has more than a certain degree of plausibility. If blockchain is supposed to be a tech to augment trust, the crypto winter is like a reminder that hype and wild-wild west lack of regulation aren't the best conditions for a supposedly new digital asset class to flourish in.

This story doesn't just raise red flags, okay. It makes you question the ethics and intelligence of young crypto entrepreneurs. Facebook recently hired a group from the blockchain start-up Chainspace, that will help boost Facebook's expertise in things like "sharding".

With CryptoExchanges, blockchain startups, ICOs and even crypto hedge funds under threat due to the BTC price crunch and seeming weakness of ICOs, crypto nose-dives are likely freeing up blockchain engineers for tech companies. The fate of public blockchains like Ethereum rests on their ability to upgrade to prove scalability fast enough just as centralized blockchains are being adopted faster by the enterprise sector

The entire crypto community is under increased scrutiny to how for example how Quadriga was run. As Canada’s Globe and Mail reports, the company was essentially a one-man show. Dead or alive, we need a more regulated space with entrepreneurs and startups that can demonstrate real products, professional leadership and are fraud-proof to young male investors desperate to invest in shiny disruption and Bitcoin related tech.

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