Quadriga (company)

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Quadriga Fintech Solutions was the owner and operator of QuadrigaCX. QuadrigaCX was believed to be Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange at the time of its collapse in 2019, with the exchange ceasing operations and the company filing for bankruptcy with C$215.7 million in liabilities and about C$28 million in assets. The company's CEO and founder, Gerald William Cotten, died in December 2018 after traveling to India. Up to C$250 million (US$190 million) in cryptocurrency owed to 115,000 customers was missing or could not be accessed because only Cotten held the password to off-line cold wallets. Quadriga likely never invested the funds entrusted to it, according to Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency tracking firm. Either the funds were never received or quickly went missing. "What Quadriga really did with the money that customers gave it to buy Bitcoin remains a mystery," according to Chainalysis. Ernst & Young was appointed as an independent monitor while Quadriga was granted temporary legal protection from its creditors under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act. On 8 April 2019 the firm entered bankruptcy under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act as the possibility of a successful reorganization appeared to be remote. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were reportedly investigating the company. Lawyers for the customers of the exchange asked that Cotten's body be exhumed. In June 2020, the Ontario Securities Commission officially concluded that Quadriga was indeed a fraud and a Ponzi scheme. It stated that Gerald Cotten committed fraud by opening accounts under aliases and crediting himself with fictitious currency and crypto asset balances, which he traded with unsuspecting clients, and that "What happened at Quadriga was an old-fashioned fraud wrapped in modern technology."