Cryptocurrencies are very popular nowadays. In the market people are buying them hand to hand and investing their money into them. The market of cryptocurrencies has gone up in last few years and a parrallel black market, where cryptocurrencies rule, is thriving. Some benefits of cryptocurrencies are its intangibility, ease of doing any kind of business in it specially in black-market and high growth rate. As it is stored digitally, there is no requirement of lockers, safes and banks to keep it with.
Even a few countries have made cryptocurrencies legal in their markets. Venezuela’s Petro is the latest example, which is a oil based cryptocurrency. Venezuela is the first nation, which not just legalised but adopted a cryptocurrency as its national currency in 2018 to overcome US sanctions. Japan also legalised, Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency in her market.
But Quadriga tells an interesting story of the dark side of this world. That would definitely change your mind, if you are going to invest your money into the cryptocurrency.
Quadriga, a Vancouver based company, is one of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges lost recently 145 million US dollar with sudden death of its 30 year old CEO and co-founder, Gerald Cotten.
He had been in India in December 2018 and volunteering in an orphanage, while died in his early age of 30th. Cause of his death was Crohn’s disease(https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9357-crohns-disease). It is a group of intestinal inflammetary diseases that commonly affects lower part of small intestine. The nature of this disease is ulcerative. Sores and scars come up on the intestinal wall in this condition. It can affect any area of the digestive system of the patient from food pipe to the rectum. It is also called inflammetary bowel diesese.
Symptom of this disease are chronic diarrhea, bleeding from the rectum, weight loss as intestine loses its power to digest food and stunted growth in the children.
It is reported that $145 million and Quadriaga other assets’ access passwords were gone with the company’s CEO. The investors those invested in cryptocurrencies could not get their money back until the passwords to access the cryptocurrencies’ locker are retrieved.
The passwords were stored in a offline wallet called ‘cold wallets’. So that nobody can steal them by hacking the system. The laptop used by Cotton was encrypted too his widow told in an affidavit to the Court.
As Cotton’s company is going through the crisis, it has been granted bankruptcy protection to sort out its financial mishap due to untimely death of the CEO by inflammetary bowel disease. A few are alleging that it would be an exit scam of Quadriga’s CEO by playing his death. We can not say what is the real story but it is clear that investing in cryptocurrencies is like gambling at higher risk.
(This article is based on the news published in ‘The Indian Express on 7th Feb. 2019- ‘Canadian crypto exchange can’t access $145 m after its CEO dies in India’)