In Bitcoin news today, Bitcoin Depot, once the largest BTC ATM operator in North America with 9,276 kiosks across the US, Canada, and Australia, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas on May 18, 2026, and has already taken its entire ATM network offline.
Here is the central tension this article unpacks: Chapter 11 is not the same as a company vanishing overnight, but Bitcoin Depot has already shut down its machines, which means the usual reassurances about restructuring do not fully apply here.
Whether your money is safe depends entirely on where it was in the process when the network went dark, which is causing mass panic among its many…