Quote note to listeners: I’ll be doing a live podcast recording in NYC on the evening of March 20 with guest Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum. Venue TBD. There are a limited number of early bird tickets, so buy now!

To hear that a 29-year-old died of complications from Crohn’s disease is shocking enough. But it’s practically unbelievable when the person in question was in charge of a crypto exchange that held an estimated $150 million of customer funds and that he was the only person with access to the reserves. That’s what many in the crypto community thought last week when news of the death of Gerald Cotten, the CEO of Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX, spread. Taylor Monahan, the CEO of MyCrypto, looked at the Ethereum blockchain itself to see what could be gleaned from QuadrigaCX’s holdings. She talks about whether or not the exchange had “cold storage” — addresses in which customer funds were held, what Quadriga was doing with customer funds and why some of the choices it was making seem at odds with the typical operations a crypto exchange. She also discusses what crypto users can take away from this debacle.

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Episode links:

Taylor Monahan: https://twitter.com/tayvano_

My Crypto: https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1092439754849759233

QuadrigaCX: https://www.quadrigacx.com/

Taylor’s tweet storm about her findings from the blockchain: https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1092439754849759233

CoinDesk article recapping what is currently known and not yet known about the case: https://www.coindesk.com/quadrigacx-explainer

CoinDesk article on how the hospital has released information about Gerald Cotten’s death: https://www.coindesk.com/quadrigacx-indian-hospital-releases-details-about-ceos-death

Globe and Mail article noting Cotten finalized his will less than two weeks before he died: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/streetwise/article-quadriga-cant-access-190-million-following-ceos-death-court/

New York Times article on the situation: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/quadriga-cx-gerald-cotten.html