Brandon Mintz put Bitcoin on the corner. Then the business changed.

Brandon Mintz once found himself rolling a 300-pound bitcoin kiosk down a rented truck’s ramp. A liftgate would have been preferable. None was available. He was installing the machines himself in Bitcoin Depot’s early days, and on one delivery he lost his footing while handling a kiosk on a dolly. The machine nearly fell on him. Digital money, it turned out, came with a substantial amount of physical work.

That episode catches something useful about Mintz’s career. The business he built occupied the space between a complicated financial technology and a familiar retail errand. Someone walked into a store carrying cash; a machine helped turn it into bitcoin. The proposition depended on software, certainly, but also on finding a shop willing to surrender some floor space. Even the future needed a place to stand.

Mintz founded Bitcoin Depot in 2016, after graduating from the University of Georgia. In 2023, he celebrated its public listing at Nasdaq. By 2026, he had left its executive leadership, and the company had entered Chapter 11 to wind down operations and sell assets. The journey contains both a practical insight about customers and a difficult reckoning with the business built around it.

Before the kiosk, a lake and a margin

Mintz grew up in Woodstock, Georgia, near a lake. Restaurant and fast-food work introduced him to the limits of an hourly wage. Buying boats and Jet Skis, fixing them and reselling them offered a different arrangement: the reward could rise with his judgment and effort. He later recalled earning more in his first week of that business than he had expected to earn over a summer serving tables.

At university, he began looking for an enterprise that could grow beyond those individual transactions. He encountered bitcoin in 2013. His first attempts to buy it online were frustrating; a cash-based purchase worked more readily. He developed Cash To Crypto, through which customers could deposit cash at a bank and receive bitcoin. His problem as a customer had supplied a business proposition.

There was also a less commercial college experiment. Mining equipment in his Athens apartment generated enough heat to make the place uncomfortable even in December. He spread machines into other people’s apartments to relieve the burden. The scene has the charm of a student project that has exceeded its accommodation allowance. It also places him among the early users learning through the machinery itself.

Cash To Crypto preceded Bitcoin Depot, but the next business needed a different way to handle customers. Mintz wanted automation and less dependence on his own time. A kiosk offered a repeatable point of sale. After college, he put machines into Atlanta locations and committed himself to the business. The move from personal service to a distributed network became the defining change in his working life.

“I knew I never wanted to work for anyone again.”

Brandon Mintz, recalling his early business, 2021

The customer had cash

In a 2020 interview, Mintz described the difficulty of finding where an unfamiliar technology fitted into ordinary life. His answer was to put it in places people already visited. A convenience store offered something an online exchange could not: a nearby physical location, with an entrance customers knew how to find. There was no need to invent a new shopping habit before introducing a new financial one.

The pitch was convenience. People who preferred cash could use it to acquire bitcoin through a kiosk. That preference mattered to Mintz’s argument about the business. A service designed around bank transfers and online accounts did not meet every customer where they were. His own experience had made that gap visible, and the company’s identity stayed tied to it.

When asked how he approached people skeptical of bitcoin, Mintz described a small demonstration: take them to a machine and help them try a $20 purchase. It was a characteristic sales method, bringing a large and sometimes forbidding subject down to one transaction. The demonstration made the interface concrete. It could not, of course, settle every question about the asset or the price of using the service.

An additional product, BDCheckout, carried the cash-first idea to retail registers. Customers could generate a barcode through the app, have it scanned at a participating store and hand over cash. The kiosk was the visible emblem of Bitcoin Depot, but the underlying commercial interest was the exchange between physical money and a digital wallet. Mintz pursued more than one route across that short distance.

Circle K supplied the addresses

By 2019, Bitcoin Depot had 250 machines across the United States and was making a push into Los Angeles. Mintz wanted at least a quarter of that city’s market. The ambition was specific enough to count: locations, machines, share. For an enterprise dealing in a currency without a central address, its founder spent a good deal of attention on geography.

A July 2021 agreement with Circle K gave that attention a different scale. The companies announced a partnership spanning the United States and Canada, with more than 700 Bitcoin Depot machines already installed in 30 states. A chain relationship could carry the product across many stores, turning individual site recruitment into a broader retail arrangement.

The partnership also made the machines part of an established shopping environment. Customers did not have to seek out a specialist cryptocurrency shop. Bitcoin Depot could operate inside a chain associated with fuel, snacks and everyday purchases. The location helped explain the product before anyone touched the screen: here was another transaction available on an ordinary stop.

That distribution strategy was a major part of what Mintz built. A machine needed a host, a working interface and continuing use. Installing it was one step in a longer relationship with a retailer and its customers. A network measured in thousands of locations was also thousands of small operational commitments. The growth figures looked clean on a presentation; the work underneath remained local.

A bell, a list, a public company

Bitcoin Depot became publicly traded in 2023 through a combination with GSR II Meteora Acquisition Corp. Mintz discussed the attraction in practical terms: access to capital, stock that could be used in acquisitions and equity that could help recruit and retain employees. Public ownership belonged to an expansion strategy. It furnished tools as well as a ceremony.

On July 24, 2023, he rang Nasdaq’s opening bell. The photograph has the polished geometry of a corporate arrival: founder, podium, illuminated name. Behind it sat years of retail recruitment and machine deployment. The distance from a truck ramp to that studio was substantial, even if both occasions required Mintz to stand beside a large piece of branded equipment.

Later that year, his selection for Forbes’ 2024 Under 30 Finance list gave the journey another public marker. At the time of the December announcement, Bitcoin Depot reported more than 6,000 machines across North America and market share above 20%. Those figures describe that period of the company’s life. They belong beside the photograph with their dates attached.

His ambitions extended to consolidation. In 2023, Mintz spoke about buying other operators and using Bitcoin Depot’s software platform to create efficiencies. He expected the resources needed for compliance to weigh on smaller businesses. The company had acquired a software platform; adding operators could, in his view, make that ownership more useful. The plan joined retail expansion to acquisition economics.

The founder steps back; the network goes offline

The first leadership handover was announced in November 2025. Scott Buchanan, then president and chief operating officer, would become CEO on January 1, 2026. Mintz would become executive chairman, concentrating on strategy, growth and acquisition opportunities. Buchanan had been with the business since 2019. The announcement presented the transition as a way to divide responsibilities as the company developed.

The arrangement was brief. On March 23, Mintz resigned as executive chairman and remained a non-executive director, with an advisory role to the CEO expected. Buchanan also departed, and former MoneyGram chief Alex Holmes became chairman and CEO. By then, the company was warning of a substantial decline in its core business revenue as state regulations changed.

On May 17, Bitcoin Depot and affiliated entities filed voluntary Chapter 11 petitions in Texas. The purpose was an orderly wind-down and asset sale. Its network was taken offline. Holmes attributed the unsustainable business model to a changed regulatory environment, including transaction limits, restrictions, litigation and enforcement. That was the company’s explanation for its decision; the filing marked the practical end of the operating story Mintz had led for years.

In July, Georgia’s banking regulator announced that Bitcoin Depot Operating had voluntarily surrendered its state money transmitter license. In September, Bitcoin Bancorp announced court-approved agreements to acquire assets including approximately 2,446 kiosks, associated location agreements, intellectual property and the domain name. Some portions had closed; others remained subject to closing conditions. The network’s components had become assets another business intended to use.

What remains of the original idea

Mintz’s record contains an unusual change of scale: a young customer struggling to complete a purchase, a founder handling heavy equipment, an executive discussing acquisitions, then a former executive whose company was being dismantled through a court process. Keeping those moments together makes the story more revealing than preserving only the Nasdaq photograph. Each belonged to the same enterprise.

The original observation was plain enough. Some people had cash and wanted bitcoin; the available process could be difficult. Mintz spent years making that exchange easier to encounter in daily life. The subsequent wind-down puts a hard boundary around the achievement. He built a substantial physical network around that observation. In 2026, the business that operated it could no longer continue on its existing terms.