Categories: Lifestyle

Trust No One: New Netflix doc is all about the mystery of Vancouver’s ‘Crypto King’

Image of Gerald Cotten. Cr. via Netflix Canada

If you’re browsing Netflix this weekend, then chances are high that you’ll come across a new doc called Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King. Released this week, the new documentary has skyrocketed to become the number 1 film on the platform, and it’s focus is very close to home.

That’s because the focus for it is on Gerald ‘Gerry’ Cotten, the man behind QuadrigaCX. Originally launched in 2013, QuadrigaCX became the de facto Bitcoin trading platform in Canada, and was pretty much synonymous with the cryptocurrency for a while there. Have a friend who was/is into crypto? Chances are high that they’ve heard of it.

And even if they haven’t, most Canadians know the story of its downfall. Back in 2018, Cotten went missing in India, and was pronounced dead that December. Unfortunate, absolutely, but made even more troubling by the fact that Cotten was the sole person with access to a ‘cold wallet’ (basically, a computer with cryptocurrency on it, but with no access to the internet) storing some $250M worth of Bitcoin from over 100,000 investors/traders.

It’s not the first time cold wallets have gone, well, cold, by the way. In fact, a British man was trying to dig up an entire landfill in search of a hard drive containing access to some 7,500 Bitcoin (roughly $430M CAD at time of writing).

Anyway, back to the QuadrigaCX saga. Turns out that when you go missing with that much ‘cash’ only available to you, people start to get suspicious. So, rather than trying to explain all the ins and outs of crypto, the documentary focuses instead on people who knew Cotten, investors, and other members of the cryptocurrency community.

The result? A relatively short (it’s only 90 minutes or so) documentary that paints a vivid picture of the wild west days of cryptocurrency, when enthusiasts and entrepreneurs became multi, multi millionaires almost overnight. And when one of the big names fell, it fell hard.

We definitely think you should check it out!