Viswa Vanapalli
Gerald Cotten’s company, QuadrigaCX, was Canada’s go-to cryptocurrency exchange platform before his untimely death changed everything. It turned out that the young entrepreneur had a lot of secrets and a checkered past. Netflix’s ‘Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King’ focuses on the circumstances surrounding Gerry’s sudden death and what happened to the money that customers had on the platform. Before that, Gerry had amassed a fair bit of wealth and was seen as the head of a profitable venture. So, if you’re wondering what his net worth was, here’s what we could find.
How Did Gerald Cotten Earn His Money?
Gerald “Gerry” Cotten was born in May 1988 and grew up in Belleville in Ontario, Canada. He was always interested in technology and digital finance, later pursuing a Business degree at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Gerry graduated in 2010 and just three years later, co-founded QuadrigaCX with Michael Patryn. By then, he was already a fixture in the cryptocurrency community, becoming the Director of the Vancouver Bitcoin Co-Op in British Columbia.
Regarding starting the platform, Gerry said, “It was just a matter of setting up an exchange and then integrating that with everything that I had previously built up in that sort of industry. Because there were so few options in Canada, we ended up getting a lot of clients right away.” In the beginning, QuadrigaCX wasn’t a profitable venture. During a three-month period that ended on January 31, 2015, the company only posted a little over $22,000 in revenue, with a net loss of around $90,000.
In 2017, QuadrigaCX’s fortunes turned around when Bitcoin’s value increased exponentially. That year, about $1.2 billion worth of Bitcoin was traded on the platform, with QuadrigaCX receiving a percentage of these transactions. At the time, QuadrigaCX was run solely by Gerry, either from his home in Nova Scotia or from wherever he was during his travels.
Over time, Gerry had bought several properties in Canada in addition to a sailboat, a plane, and an island. He married Jennifer Robertson in 2018, and the couple spent a lot of their time in 2018 traveling to exotic locations. However, Bitcoin’s value also began dropping in the same year, and the company faced liquidity issues with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce freezing over $26 million of its assets. In December 2018, Gerry died suddenly while in India due to complications arising from Crohn’s disease.
Gerry’s death brought out a whole new set of problems, with nobody apart from Gerry knowing how to access the funds of millions of customers on the platform. An investigation revealed that the company was a one-man show run by Gerry and didn’t have an accounting system or a bank account. In the end, Gerry had made several fraudulent transactions with the customers’ money by betting on the value of cryptocurrency. Furthermore, before his death, Gerry signed over $9.6 million of his property and assets to Jennifer.
Gerald Cotten’s Net Worth Before his Death
Considering the value of the property and assets he owned, Gerald Cotten’s net worth before his death was estimated to be around $80 million.
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