Despite all this, Quadriga should have had about C$200 million of its customers’ funds in its cold wallets—the external hard drives, disconnected from the internet, that functioned like bank vaults. But within a month after Cotten’s reported death, blockchain investigators proved that nearly all of the inaccessible wallets were empty. Cotten, it turned out, had transferred the funds into personal accounts on competitor exchanges. At least some of those accounts had also been emptied. The operator of an exchange on which Cotten opened accounts told Ernst & Young that Cotten had squandered most of his holdings on reckless trades. On one particular margin account, he conducted 67,000 individual trades alone, placing enormous bets on fledgling currencies like Dogecoin, OmiseGO, and Zcash.

In 2014 Cotten spoke publicly of moving currencies between exchanges to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. It may be that he traded Quadriga’s funds in a frantic effort to recoup the losses he had sustained. It was the behavior of a doomed gambler employing the martingale strategy, successively doubling down in a desperate effort to get back to zero, until he had dug a hole so deep that he could only be buried inside it. After he squandered what remained in Quadriga’s coffers, the price of Bitcoin plunged, and there was a run on the exchange. Then he flew to India, where things managed to get even worse.

“THE HONEYMOON”

There is yet another possibility, one that none of the case’s investigators is willing to discount. Call it the Mastermind Theory.

It begins with a few findings that do not fit neatly into the Royal Fuckup narrative. Cotten had mentioned having a safe bolted to the rafters in the attic of his home in which he had stored the passwords to his various cryptocurrency accounts. After learning of his death, one of his contractors immediately went to the house and searched for it. He found the place in the attic where four holes had been drilled through the rafters. But the safe was gone.

Eric Schletz, the pilot who brokered Cotten’s purchase of the Cessna 400, has described having seen Cotten walking through an airport with $50,000 in cash. There were rumors of other employees taking similar trips. Perhaps Cotten’s obsessive foreign travel—he boasted of having visited more than 50 countries without ever having “been searched by customs”—was inspired not by wanderlust but by strategy. In this way Cotten could have stowed away a fortune in foreign bank accounts in preparation for a grand exit.

What if the furious trading on other exchanges near the end of his life was not careless but calculated? This is a question that the lead investigator for the FBI’s cybercrime division, Jennifer Vander Veer, has posed to crypto experts. It is theoretically possible to conduct high-volume trades in such a way as to launder funds, provided that the trades are exotic enough to ensure that the losses accrue to another account that Cotten, or an associate, controls. Cotten’s trades were so bizarre, and so risky, that this seemed plausible—just as plausible, perhaps, as the idea that Cotten believed a series of Hail Mary bets on Zcash would come through.

The RCMP and the FBI have refused to comment, but some of their interview subjects have gotten the impression that they believe Cotten might not be dead. “They asked me about 20 times if he was alive,” says one witness who has intimate knowledge of Quadriga’s workings and has been questioned by both agencies. “They always end our conversations with that question.” QCXINT, the creditor and blockchain expert, said that the FBI’s Vander Veer told him that with hundreds of millions of dollars missing and no body, “it’s an open question.” The only way to verify that the body Robertson brought home from India was Cotten is to exhume it. The RCMP, which has jurisdiction over the case, has thus far not done so. (For his part, Patryn says he hasn’t “seen any reason to think that [Cotten] is alive.”)