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When the 30-year-old founder of a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange died suddenly, he took the whereabouts of some C$180m ($135m; £105m) in cryptocurrency to his grave. Now, tens of thousands of Quadriga CX users are wondering if they will ever see their funds again.
In 2014, one of the world's biggest online cryptocurrency exchanges - MtGox - unexpectedly shut down after losing 850,000 Bitcoins valued at the time at nearly $0.4bn (£0.3bn).
Its meltdown shook investors in the volatile emerging marketplace - but the calamity at the Tokyo-based company proved a boon for a new Canadian online cryptocurrency exchange.
"People like the fact we're located in Canada and know where their money is going," Quadriga CX founder Gerald Cotten said at the time.
Some five years later, Cotten's sudden, untimely death has left thousands of his customers scrambling for information about their own missing funds.
"We don't know whether or not we're going to get our money back," Tong Zou, who says he is owed C$560,000 - his life savings - told the BBC.
"There's just a lot of uncertainty."
This month, Quadriga - which had grown to become Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange - was granted temporary bankruptcy protection in a Canadian court.
The firm said it had spent the weeks since Cotten's death trying desperately to "locate and secure our very significant cryptocurrency reserves".
Broken representations of the Bitcoin virtual currency
In court documents, Quadriga says it owes up to 115,000 users an estimated C$250m - about C$70m in hard currency and between C$180m a C$190m in cryptocurrency, based on recent market rates.
It believes - though it's not certain - that the bulk of those millions in reserves was locked away by Cotten in cold storage, which is an offline safeguard against hacking and theft.
For now, all trading has been suspended on the platform.
Bernie Doyle, CEO of Refine Labs and head of the Toronto chapter of the Government Blockchain Association, calls what's happening at Quadriga a "seismic event" in the industry.
The world of digital currency has little regulatory oversight and a history of volatile prices, hacking threats, and minimal consumer protection.
Mr Doyle says this only adds to the nascent sector's already "checkered history".
But he says "it's really unfortunate that the ecosystem takes a hit" amid one firm's problems.
What happened at Quadriga?
Court documents filed in late January offer some insight into the company.
Quadriga had no offices, no employees and no bank accounts. It was essentially a one-man band run entirely by Cotten wherever he - and his laptop - happened to be, which was usually his home in Fall River, Nova Scotia.
It used some third-party contractors to handle some of the additional work, including payment processing.
His widow, Jennifer Robertson, says she was not involved in the company until her husband died suddenly on 9 December in India from complications related to Crohn's disease.
In an affidavit, she says she has searched the couple's home and other properties for business records related to Quadriga, to no avail. The laptop on which he conducted all the business is encrypted and she doesn't have the password or recovery key.
An investigator hired to assist in recovering any records had little success.
It was also recently revealed the company somehow inadvertently transferred Bitcoins valued at almost half-a-million dollars into cold storage in early February and now can't access them.
But Quadriga's troubles didn't start with missing coins. The company's liquidity problems began months earlier.
In January 2018, Canadian bank CIBC froze five accounts containing about C$26m linked to Quadriga's payment processor in a dispute over the real owners of the funds, an issue that ended up in court.... Continue Reading
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