- Scott Buchanan stepped down as CEO effective immediately — just 83 days into a role he assumed January 1, 2026. Bitcoin Depot cited his departure as voluntary, to pursue an opportunity outside the company.
- Alex Holmes named CEO and Chairman of the Board — the former MoneyGram International CEO brings 25+ years in global payments and fintech. He joined Bitcoin Depot's board and audit committee in August 2025.
- Brandon Mintz retains ~91% voting control — despite stepping from Executive Chairman to a non-executive board role, Mintz's Class M supervoting shares give him effective control of the company regardless of his title.
- Holmes inherits a $24.9 million Q4 loss — much of it driven by an $18.5 million arbitration award in the Cash Cloud vs. BitAccess dispute. The related primary lawsuit in Nevada alleging anti-competitive destruction of Coin Cloud remains ongoing.
- BTM shares down over 95% since SPAC — the stock fell 11.31% on the day of the announcement to $2.90, reacting badly to the news of yet another leadership change.
Bitcoin Depot (NASDAQ: BTM), the largest Bitcoin ATM operator in the United States, announced Monday morning that CEO Scott Buchanan has stepped down effective immediately. He lasted 83 days.
The company simultaneously named Alex Holmes — former Chairman and CEO of MoneyGram International — as CEO and Chairman of the Board. Founder Brandon Mintz, who held the CEO title for nearly a decade before handing it to Buchanan on January 1, moved from Executive Chairman to a non-executive board seat.
Investors reacted accordingly. BTM shares fell 11.31% on the news to $2.90, approaching the stock's all-time lows. The company that went public via SPAC at roughly $65 per share (pre-reverse-split adjusted) now trades at a market capitalization of approximately $36 million. That is a destruction of over 95% of shareholder value since going public.
Who Is Alex Holmes?
Holmes is not an industry outsider stumbling into a crisis. He joined Bitcoin Depot's board of directors and audit committee in August 2025 — seven months ago — making this an internal elevation, not a cold hire.
His career spans more than 25 years in global payments and fintech. At MoneyGram International, he spent nearly 16 years in progressively senior roles — CFO, COO, then Chairman and CEO from 2016 to 2024. His departure from MoneyGram deserves context: Holmes was replaced in October 2024 when the board brought in former Walmart executive Anthony Soohoo, weeks after MoneyGram confirmed a massive customer data breach. The company claimed the leadership change was unrelated to the breach and the result of a months-long board process. Holmes was retained as an advisor to the MoneyGram board.
Most recently, he served as Executive Vice Chairman of United Texas Bank, a correspondent bank known for U.S. dollar clearing services for crypto-focused institutions. He has also served as a strategic advisor to several Web3 ventures, including Orobit Inc. and the Jingle Pay/Acamas Group in Dubai.
His stated priorities upon taking the Bitcoin Depot role: operational stability, regulatory progress, and accelerating the company's evolution into a diversified fintech platform beyond its core BTM network.
The 83-Day CEO
Buchanan's departure raises more questions than the company's press release answers. Bitcoin Depot described it as a decision to pursue a new opportunity — the standard corporate language for a departure that both sides want to move past quickly.
When we investigated Buchanan's appointment earlier this year, we uncovered an executive bonus agreement — buried in Bitcoin Depot's own SEC filings — that tied Buchanan's compensation directly to insider distributions and Tangible Net Worth thresholds. The structure created a perverse incentive: the more cash the company distributed to insiders (primarily Mintz), the larger Buchanan's bonus. He was, on paper, being paid to facilitate the very extraction that was destroying shareholder value. Whether that compensation structure played any role in his abrupt departure is unknown, but Buchanan walked away from what was designed to be a lucrative arrangement.
Buchanan is not the only recent C-suite departure. COO Elizabeth Simer — who joined Bitcoin Depot on January 1, 2026, the same day as Buchanan, announced in November 2025 as part of the company's leadership overhaul — resigned on March 11, 2026, after approximately two months in the role. Five days later, Bitcoin Depot held an earnings call that did not reference her resignation. No replacement has been named. Two senior executives hired as part of the same governance overhaul, both gone within weeks of each other.
Brandon Mintz held the CEO title from Bitcoin Depot's founding in 2016 through December 31, 2025. Scott Buchanan took over as CEO on January 1, 2026 and lasted 83 days. COO Elizabeth Simer, hired the same day, resigned after two months. Alex Holmes is now the company's third leader in under three months. For a company trying to convince investors and regulators it has stable governance, the pattern of rapid departures tells a different story.
| Period | CEO | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 – Dec 31, 2025 | Brandon Mintz (Founder) | Became Executive Chairman Jan 1, 2026; now non-executive board member |
| Jan 1 – Mar 24, 2026 | Scott Buchanan | Stepped down after ~83 days |
| Mar 24, 2026 – present | Alex Holmes | Also named Chairman of the Board |
What Holmes Inherits
Holmes steps into a company trying to convince investors its $24.9 million Q4 2025 net loss was a one-time event. Holmes inherits all of it.
Much of that loss stems from an $18.5 million arbitration award in the Cash Cloud vs. BitAccess dispute — a case in which an Ontario arbitrator found that BitAccess (a Bitcoin Depot subsidiary) had effectively sabotaged Cash Cloud's ATM network. The overlapping facts feed directly into the still-ongoing primary lawsuit in Nevada, where Cash Cloud alleges that Bitcoin Depot orchestrated an anti-competitive attack against what was, at the time, its largest competitor: Coin Cloud. The $18.5 million award was for the BitAccess software component alone. The Nevada case, which addresses the broader alleged conspiracy, has not yet gone to trial.
Beyond the litigation balance sheet, Holmes inherits an active regulatory front:
- Iowa Attorney General lawsuit — alleging $20 million in consumer losses from scam-facilitated transactions, with a 94.92% scam rate among large transactions
- Massachusetts Attorney General lawsuit — alleging 83% of large-dollar customers were scam victims
- Missouri Attorney General investigation — a civil investigative demand targeting Bitcoin Depot among five operators
- Maine settlement — $1.9 million paid to compensate fraud victims
- Cash Cloud/Coin Cloud litigation — the Nevada anti-competition lawsuit remains pending, with the $18.5M arbitration award as a precursor
There are also the personnel issues. A former compliance manager publicly alleged mass layoffs of compliance staff in February 2026, claiming the company was gutting the very department responsible for preventing the scam-facilitated transactions at the center of the state AG lawsuits.
The Mintz Question: Who Actually Controls Bitcoin Depot?
The most important detail in Monday's announcement may be what it didn't say.
Brandon Mintz is described as moving to a non-executive board member role with an advisory capacity. The press release notes he remains a long-term shareholder. What it does not mention is the nature of that shareholding.
Mintz holds Class M supervoting shares that command approximately 91% of the company's total voting power. Bitcoin Depot's dual-class share structure gives Class M shares dramatically more votes per share than the Class A shares traded on NASDAQ. This means that regardless of his title — CEO, Executive Chairman, non-executive board member, or casual advisor — Mintz controls the outcome of every shareholder vote. He can elect and remove every member of the board. He can block any acquisition, any merger, any fundamental change to the company.
Bitcoin Depot's Class M shares carry supervoting rights that give founder Brandon Mintz approximately 91% of all voting power. Class A shareholders — the public investors on NASDAQ — collectively hold roughly 9%. Short of a large block sale by Mintz, this voting dominance is structurally untouchable. The change of board leadership and CEO may be operationally significant, but in terms of corporate control, it is window dressing.
Our investigation into insider enrichment at Bitcoin Depot documented how Mintz extracted over $70 million through stock sales and distributions while state attorneys general allege the company knowingly profited from scam transactions targeting elderly Americans. A follow-up investigation revealed a hidden executive bonus agreement tying the CEO's compensation to insider distributions and Tangible Net Worth metrics — creating structural incentives to prioritize cash extraction over compliance investment.
Holmes may set new operational priorities. But the governance reality is unchanged: the founder who built the company, extracted the cash, and presided over the regulatory crisis still controls the vote.
Why MoneyGram Matters — and Why He Left
Holmes's MoneyGram background is not incidental. MoneyGram operated in over 200 countries with intensive regulatory oversight from dozens of national regulators simultaneously. The company settled a $100 million deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2018 over fraud-related compliance failures — and Holmes was the executive who guided the company through the remediation and subsequent operational turnaround.
That experience maps directly onto Bitcoin Depot's current regulatory exposure. The company needs someone who has navigated consent orders, state AG negotiations, and federal compliance frameworks before — and can do it while maintaining a public-market reporting cadence.
But Holmes's MoneyGram departure also warrants scrutiny. In October 2024, MoneyGram's board replaced him with former Walmart executive Anthony Soohoo. The announcement came weeks after MoneyGram confirmed a massive customer data breach that compromised an unspecified amount of personal customer information. MoneyGram said the leadership change was unrelated and the result of a months-long board process — but the timing invited skepticism. Holmes was kept on as an advisor to the MoneyGram board, the same soft-landing arrangement Bitcoin Depot is now giving Brandon Mintz.
The data breach angle is particularly relevant to Bitcoin Depot's business. As we recently investigated, customer data breaches at Bitcoin ATM operators have become a primary vector for recovery fraud — scammers obtain leaked KYC data from breached operators, then retarget those same victims with fake "recovery" schemes that route through Bitcoin ATMs. Three major operators exposed over 121,000 customers' personal data in 18 months. Holmes now leads a company where data security failures don't just create regulatory liability — they feed the very scam pipeline that state attorneys general are suing Bitcoin Depot over.
Whether Holmes has the latitude to make real changes under Mintz's 91% voting control is the open question.
The Stock Tells the Story
BTM shares closed at $2.90 on March 24, down 11.31% on the day. The stock is trading near its all-time low.
For context: Bitcoin Depot went public via SPAC merger in 2023 at an implied valuation of approximately $885 million. The company's market capitalization today is roughly $36 million — a decline of over 95%. Public investors who bought into the SPAC thesis have been nearly wiped out, while insiders pocketed over $70 million and the company faces allegations from the Massachusetts Attorney General of knowingly profiting from scam transactions targeting vulnerable consumers.
The leadership carousel — three CEOs in three months — does not inspire confidence that the company has found stable footing. Nor does the fact that the person with effective control of the company has systematically reduced his operational involvement while retaining every share of voting power.
What to Watch
Holmes cited three priorities: operational stability, regulatory progress, and platform diversification. The first two are urgent. The third — Bitcoin Depot recently launched a business advance product called ReadyBucks — is the kind of pivot narrative that only works if the core business stops generating headlines about elderly scam victims and departing CEOs.
The questions that matter now:
- Will Holmes negotiate settlements in the Iowa and Massachusetts AG cases, or fight them at trial?
- Will the company invest in rebuilding the compliance infrastructure that was allegedly gutted under the previous leadership?
- How will the Nevada litigation against Cash Cloud/Coin Cloud resolve, and what are the financial exposure parameters beyond the $18.5 million already awarded?
- Does Mintz's retention of 91% voting control limit Holmes's ability to make governance reforms that investors and regulators are looking for?
Bitcoin ATM News has published extensive investigative coverage of Bitcoin Depot over the past several months. For the full picture of the company Holmes is inheriting, see our reporting:
- While Consumers Lost Millions to Scams, Bitcoin Depot's CEO Was Cashing Out
- The Insider Agreement: How Bitcoin Depot's Own Filings Reveal the Incentive Architecture Behind $70 Million in Insider Cash-Outs
- Cash Cloud vs. BitAccess: $18.47M Arbitration Award and the Bitcoin Depot Connection
- Iowa AG Sues Bitcoin Depot and CoinFlip: $20 Million in Consumer Losses
- Massachusetts AG Sues Bitcoin Depot: 83% of Large Customers Were Scam Victims
- Former Compliance Manager Alleges Mass Layoffs
- Bitcoin Depot Pays Maine $1.9 Million to Compensate Fraud Victims
- Bitcoin Depot Now Requires ID for Every Transaction