Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King is a newly released Netflix documentary film that tells the story of the rise and a collapse of the Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX. The film was released in many regions outside of US about a month ago, but just recently became available to stream on Netflix in the US. Like me, you may have never heard about QuadrigaCX, and never knew about its founder Gerald Cotten. But we have heard many other stories how centralized crypto exchanges failed their users and people ended up losing a lot of their money and cryptos.
This documentary explores how people lost they hard earned assets by trusting QuadrigaCX and its CEO Gerald Cotten. Young crypto entrepreneur, Gerald Cotten died unexpectedly in 2018 and this lead QuadrigaCX go bankrupt and unable to return its users their assets. Gerry is believed to be the only person with access to private keys and with his death nobody can access these funds anymore. At least that's who it appears to be. However, due to the lack of clarity around the circumstances of Gerry's death, how it was announced, and many investors losing a lot of their money many remain suspicious of the stories they are told.
Investors come together on platforms like telegram and reddit to make sense of this situation and find out more, and most importantly figure out if they somehow can their money back. They quickly start suspecting that Gerry actually didn't die but rather this was an exit scam that defrauded QuadrigaCX users for more than $200 million dollars. Various interested parties start their investigations to find out the truth. As they more information is revealed, things keep looking even worse than what was believed to be before.
The documentary tells the story of things that has happened, yet it seems so not real. There are so many twists. Either due to the superb filmmaking skills or just because events unfolded in such a unique manner, often it felt like watching a work of fiction. This is a very sad story or a collection of sad stories. It is also a story that has an educational value. Crypto history is full of positive stories like the innovative idea and technology Satoshi gave to the world for free, like meaningful networks like Hive build to offer better alternatives, like the success of Ethereum network, etc. But there are also stories like scamming people, ponzi schemes, rugpulls, exit scams, exchange hacks, hostile takeovers, etc.
The most powerful message this film shares is Trust No One in crypto world, especially when it comes to individual influencer figures and centralized exchanges whose goals often are not aligned with the interest of users they claim to provide service to. The film reveals the strangest and paradoxical phenomenon in crypto. That is while crypto technologies offer property rights without a need for a middleman, many choose to put their trust and assets into centralized exchanges. I personally do not complete agree with a philosophy of "trust no one". Life without trust is gloomy. I prefer, trust but verify. But that is in general terms. When it comes to truly powerful use case of the blockchain technologies is removing trust from the equitation altogether. Hence, we call them trustless systems.
The film is also a story of greed. There were many who lost money in QuadrigaCX and all of their stories are interesting. The one I felt really bad about is the story of Tong Zou, a software engineer from San Francisco. When he sees some of his friends becoming rich by investing early in bitcoin and crypto, he decides to invest in crypto as well. First problem or a mistake he makes is he takes out a load for about $80k with high interest rates and buys almost at the top of the bull market. Then bear market starts and he ends up losing about 75% of his initial investment. He gets out of crypto, but the loans still need to be paid and interests keep increasing the loan.
With this bad luck in crypto, Tong decides to sell his apartment in San Francisco to pay off his loans. After he sells and pays off his loans, he has $400k in cash. Looks like his real estate investment performed a lot better than his crypto investments. At least he has $400k, so what he lost $50k in crypto. But then he decides to move his money to Canada. The problem he faces is the 2% fee that he would have to pay to the banks to transfer this much money. It seems to be a lot of money paid for nothing to him. I guess he didn't want to lose any more money.
Because he didn't want to pay 2% in transfer fees, he starts to explore other options. Since he know in crypto transfer fees are low, maybe crypto could help him to move his money without paying 2% fee. That's how he finds out about QuadrigaCX. He buys bitcoin, sends to QuadrigaCX account, sells to Canadian dollars. All looks great so far. Now, when he initiates a withdrawal, things don't go as planned. Withdrawal doesn't go through, and they keep telling him to wait. Days go by, weeks go by, months go by. Nothing. And then the news of Gerald's death is announced. QuadrigaCX collapses. Tong loses all of the 400k. Crypto wasn't nice to Tong at all. He pretty much lost everything he has earned by hard work. Now they are all gone.
Overall, the documentary was worth watching. It explores many different angles of the story, it keeps the viewer wondering about what actually happened with so many twists and possibilities as they tell the story. I think works like this can help educate more people to do more search when investing. At the same time the film may also drive some people away from crypto, especially those who don't understand the bitcoin technology as solution to the flaws in current financial systems yet.
The film answers many questions around the mysteries around QuadrigaCX and Gerald Cotten. But it also leaves many questions unanswered, perhaps because there are simply no answers to them. I believe many will walk away with different conclusions. Have you seen the film yet? What are your thoughts about it? Let me know in the comments.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
