Bitcoin Depot’s operations have come to an end following its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing recently (May 18). The company took its entire network of 9,000 Bitcoin ATMs offline the same day, while its shares dropped to a penny in premarket trading.
Outgoing CEO Alex Holmes pointed to regulators as the reason for the collapse. As compliance kept getting harder, with some states putting caps on the transaction limits of customers and a few other jurisdictions banning kiosks entirely, the numbers eventually stopped adding up.
The petition was filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. The cryptocurrency operator is seeking an orderly wind-down and plans to sell off its assets. Canadian operations were folded into the same filing, although the actual proceedings will happen separately in Canada, while the rest of the international footprint will be unwound through local processes.
The warning signs
It had already been a tough year for Bitcoin Depot before the bankruptcy filing. In April, hackers got into the company’s crypto wallets and stole $3.7 million. This was just one month after Holmes was made CEO in a leadership overhaul triggered by Connecticut’s revocation of the company’s money transmission license.
The new title was hardly a promotion to celebrate because by this point, the company was already warning investors to expect revenue to fall 30% to 40% in 2026 due to aggressive state regulatory actions.
The first quarter of 2026 turned out even worse. Revenue plunged 49.2% compared to the same period last year as the company swung from a $12.2 million net profit to a $9.5 million net loss. The earnings report itself was filed late, with Bitcoin Depot citing a “material weakness” in cash-in-transit reconciliation and needing more time to complete the books.
Free-falling on the tape
Looking at the stock chart isn’t pretty either. Shares peaked at $0.75 in mid-2025 and bled steadily for the next nine months.
Every EMA (Exponential Moving Average, a technical indicator that tracks average share price over time), now sits well above the current price, with the 200-day EMA up at $0.1170 while the lower Bollinger Band at $0.0180 had already breached before today. The stock was already down 57.51% for the week before premarket trading pushed it down to a penny.
The cryptocurrency platform opened for business in 2016 and grew into North America’s biggest Bitcoin ATM network. At its peak, the company operated more than 9,000 machines worldwide. The product was almost too simple to be regulated. Customers could walk up to a kiosk, insert the cash, and walk away with Bitcoin in their wallet with no app, no account, no bank required.
Regulators didn’t like the simplicity and rising fraud reports, especially scams in which older victims were coached over the phone to deposit cash into Bitcoin Depot Kiosks, prompting states to set transaction caps, stricter licensing rules, and outright bans, with the pressure showing no signs of easing.
Sources: Bitcoin Depot, Kroll, Benzinga