Netflix has announced that next year it will air a documentary entitled “Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King” about the story of Gerard Cotten, the controversial founder of cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga, who died mysteriously in 2018, aged 30, in India during his honeymoon.
Summary
The mystery of Quadriga and Cotten’s death in a Netflix documentary
His story is still causing a lot of controversy, considering he is thought to have scammed his customers out of $250 million, thanks to the possession of a number of his customers’ cold wallets.
According to a press release from the American pay-per-view streaming giant, the documentary will attempt to shed light on a story with plenty of dark spots, following the stories of some of the Canadian exchange’s customers who turned investigators to look for the access keys to their accounts, which were in Cotten’s possession and then disappeared upon his death.
The mysterious death of the Canadian crypto financier in India (due to complications from Crohn’s disease) has therefore left behind a thick aura of mystery, which investigations by Canadian and American authorities have not yet managed to clarify.
According to some, his death may have been a simple set-up in order to disappear with the customers’ money. A month before his death, Cotten had written a will in which he left all his assets to his wife Jennifer Robertson.
Some clients tried in vain to ask the Canadian authorities to dig up his body, raising doubts about the veracity of his death.
When Canadian authorities finally managed to get hold of Connet’s wallets in 2019, there was no trace of the funds in them.
Cotten, the visionary nerd who wanted to revolutionize Canadian finance
Who was Gerard Cotten, the nerd who caused a stir in Canadian finance by creating the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange?
As the Netflix TV series will attempt to show, his story is perhaps destined to be one of the biggest mysteries in cryptocurrencies, right after the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
Cotten, a true computer genius, founded Quadriga in 2014 together with Michael Patryn, the false identity of the American Omar Dhanani, who was involved in a series of cybercrimes in his homeland.
In 2016, the two parted ways and Cotten was left alone at the helm of Quadriga, which had grown exponentially in the meantime.
Cotten was very good at taking advantage of the great market rally of 2017, but his greed made him bite off more than he could chew. Exposed to a very large sum especially on Ethereum, he was overwhelmed by the collapse of all cryptocurrencies.
According to a 2019 Ernst&Young report, Cotten had a very high standard of living and spent an inordinate amount of money on yachts (his great passion), villas and luxury cars.
In order to do so, Cotten would use fake accounts on his own exchange to buy clients’ bitcoin, using fake Canadian dollars he would then move those tokens to buy cryptocurrencies on other exchanges.
According to some investigators, he was involved in Ponzi schemes at a very young age, whose fraudulent gains allowed him to jump into the cryptocurrency world.
Netflix to invest in cryptocurrencies
The fact that Netflix is involved in cryptocurrencies is nothing new.
There are several TV series or documentaries aired by the American streaming giant that have directly or indirectly dealt with the world of cryptocurrencies.Â
According to Tim Draper, an American billionaire venture capitalist, the Californian company will be the next big American company to invest in cryptocurrencies.
This prediction is motivated by the fact that Netflix founder Reed Hastings has always been a technology-loving innovator and has long expressed interest in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
Who knows if the airing of such a controversial documentary on the crypto world might be an attempt to dismantle these rumours or perhaps a first approach to fully understand the risks and possibilities offered by the digital currency market.
