[12] Gerald Cotten (born 11 May 1988)[14] lived in Belleville, Ontario, before attending the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto.

Cotten also sold a "proxy service that would reroute a user's internet connection so that their IP address would be hidden".

[16][15] Cotten learned about Bitcoin in Toronto and travelled to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he founded Quadriga in November 2013 with Michael Patryn.

[18] In June 2017, Quadriga announced that they had lost ethereum worth US$14 million due to a smart contract error.

[23][24] C$28 million held by Costodian, a Quadriga payment processor, was frozen by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) in January 2018.

[18] Michael Gastauer, Chief Executive of WB21, has been named in a civil lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a US$165 million fraud.

[28] Another payment processor used by Quadriga, Crypto Capital, was named in a civil suit filed by the New York Attorney General in April 2019.

Rather than pay customers via bank wires, they were told to come to a nondescript building in Laval, Quebec, to pick up the cash.

[7][8] Quadriga co-founder Michael Patryn was identified by The Globe and Mail as Omar Dhanani, who was convicted on identity theft charges in the U.S. and served 18 months in Federal prison.

She had accompanied him to a hospital in Jaipur the previous day and he was diagnosed with septic shock, perforation, peritonitis, and intestinal obstruction.

A C$100,000 trust fund was made to provide lifelong care for Cotten's two chihuahuas in case of Robertson's death.

[35][36] On 14 January 2019,[37] Quadriga announced that their CEO Gerald Cotten had died the month prior from Crohn's disease while doing volunteer work at an orphanage in India.

[44][45] On 13 December 2019, the court-appointed law firm representing the exchange's former users sent a letter to the RCMP asking that they exhume Cotten's body to confirm his identity and verify a cause of death.

"[48] Gerald Cotten's widow has maintained that she knew nothing about her husband's activities and agreed to forfeit $12 million in assets.

[51] Quadriga's lawyer, the firm Stewart McKelvey, withdrew from the case due to a potential conflict of interest.

[52] On 10 March 2023, the trustee in bankruptcy Ernst & Young declared a first interim dividend at the rate of C$0.13 per CAD of proven claim value.

[56] A Netflix documentary titled Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King about the story of Gerald Cotten was released in March 2022.

[57] A 2021 8-episode podcast entitled Exit Scam followed the buildup of Quadriga, and investigated whether Gerald Cotten had faked his own death.

[58] The story of Gerald Cotten also served as the basis for the plot to the first episode of Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent.