Cash Cloud, the Bitcoin ATM Maker, is broken in the middle of the crypto winter

You’ve probably seen a…a big, orange eyesore shoved awkwardly into the corner of your local supermarket or placed ominously near the neighborhood gas station. Should you be foolish enough to approach, the eyesore will encourage you to dig into your wallet and fork over cold hard cash in exchange for make-believe money from the internet…

It’s…*shudder*…the dreaded crypto ATM. A bizarre artifact of the current cultural moment, these machines have flooded American cities over the past few years, but the boom times of the small bitcoin dispensers may soon be over. One of their largest US operators are broke.

Cash Cloud—which supplies about 7.9 percent of bitcoin ATMs in the US – filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Nevada bankruptcy court on Tuesday, Cointelegraph reports. The company’s bankruptcy comes just weeks after Cash Cloud’s biggest financial supportercrypto lender Genesis Global, too filed for bankruptcyyet another victim of the cryptocurrency’s massive downturn the last nine months. The Las Vegas-based ATM providerwhich sells its line of Coin Cloud crypto machines in both the United States and Brazil, has only $50 million to $100 million in assets but has liabilities of between $100 million to $500 million, according to its filing for bankruptcy. The submission also states that the company has between 5,001 and 10,000 creditors. I’m no Goldman Sachs intern, but I’d say it seems bad.

Gizmodo reached out to Coin Cloud for comment and will update this story if it does answers. In a statement provided to Cointelegraph, Coin Cloud founder and CEO Chris McAlary said the bankruptcy would allow the company to “rework our debt, protect the interests of our creditors and emerge as a stronger, more financially stable company.” McAlary added that he remained “optimistic about the future of the cryptocurrency industry.”

Over the past few years, crypto ATMs have crept into America’s less glamorous places, pops up in the cities’ truck stops, gas stations and convenience stores, as crypto letters national fervor seriously moved on. That glow is definitely over. Axios write that between September 2020 and September 2022, the number of machines in the US more than tripled, bringing the total up to at least 63,000 machines, according to an online estimate. Of that number, Coin Cloud played an important role, representing a 7.9% share of the country’s bitcoin ATM market overall, writes Axios. However, that prominence did not allow it to escape the destructive reach of the ongoing “crypto winter.”