After Gerald W. Cotten died last year, his clients at the cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga CX found themselves unable to gain access to at least $250 million in their accounts. The company’s operations were encrypted, and he was the only person who knew the passwords needed to move the funds, the company said.

Now, with law enforcement officials in two countries investigating potential wrongdoing at the firm, frustrated investors want definitive proof that Mr. Cotten is actually dead.

Lawyers appointed by the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, where Quadriga is based, to represent its users asked Canadian law enforcement officials in a letter on Friday to exhume his body and conduct an autopsy “to confirm both its identity and the cause of death.”

They cited “the questionable circumstances surrounding Mr. Cotten’s death and the significant losses” suffered by his company’s investors, as well as “the need for certainty around the question of whether Mr. Cotten is in fact deceased.”

And time is of the essence, they said. The lawyers requested that the exhumation and autopsy be completed “by spring of 2020, given decomposition concerns.”

Asim Iqbal, one of the lawyers from the Toronto-based firm Miller Thomson, which is representing the investors, declined to comment on the request on Monday. Caroline Duval, a spokeswoman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which received the letter, also declined to comment. She said an investigation into Quadriga was underway.

Mr. Cotten, who was 30 at the time of his death, co-founded the company, whose online exchange enabled trades of Bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrency, in 2013. His death — and Quadriga’s subsequent inability to pay its investors — drew both outrage and suspicion soon after the fallout of his passing became clear.

The firm announced his death on Jan. 14 in a Facebook post that said he had died more than a month earlier — on Dec. 9, 2018 — while traveling in India. The company said he died of complications from Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease that is rarely fatal.

Quadriga’s platform went offline shortly after his death was announced, on Jan. 28, meaning users could no longer access their accounts. That led investors to vent their frustrations on sites like Reddit and Twitter, where a theory soon spread that Mr. Cotten may have faked his own death as part of a scheme.

Richard Niedermayer, a lawyer for Mr. Cotten’s widow, Jennifer Robertson, said in an email that she was “heartbroken to learn” of the request for his body to be exhumed. He said Mr. Cotten’s death “should not be in doubt.”

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