Molten
From the coin floor to the first tank
A Texas coin manufacturer watches his factory try to kill him, sells it to pay everyone he owes, and bets what is left on a blockchain nobody has heard of — in a garage, in August, in Texas.
Season One is a burn-the-boats season. It opens in a working mint — noise, heat, metal — and ends in a room full of quiet, humming tanks. Everything in between is Bobby losing the thing he built and refusing to lose the people who built it with him.
The engine of the season is a simple, brutal question that gets asked in five different ways: what are you willing to sell to keep your word? The factory. The house's cushion. The comfort of being right. Kira's coin collection, sitting in a safe in the hallway like a loaded argument.
Tonally: hot, loud, funny in the way that only exhausted people are funny. The neighbors are a Greek chorus with a beer fridge. The stakes are a daughter's kidney and a promise to creditors that nobody in the industry expected to be kept.
The beats
Treatment order, not episode order. Episodes get broken out once the shape holds.
- 01
Cold open — molten
INT. TEXAS MINT FLOOR — NIGHT. A casting machine the size of a truck engine coughs, then lets go. Molten silver goes where molten silver is never supposed to go. Somebody's sleeve is on fire and nobody screams, because on this floor that is a Tuesday. BOBBY beats it out with a shop rag, checks the guy, and goes right back to the machine — because the machine is the only thing standing between this building and thirty families.
We hold on his face lit orange by a crucible. Title card. This is a business that makes honest money by nearly killing people for it.
- 02
The order that was going to fix everything
A political-novelty coin order — the big one, the one that clears the year. Six-figure tooling. Three shifts. Everyone works Thanksgiving.
Then the call: the distributor is out. Compliance, optics, a lawyer somewhere got nervous. No fault, no fraud, no recourse. Just a pallet of finished product that is now worth melt and a receivable that will never arrive.
Bobby says "okay" four times in the call, hangs up, and stands in the parking lot for a very long time. KIRA watches from the office window and knows exactly what the length of that pause costs.
- 03
Thirty days of runway
The kitchen-table math scene. Bobby lays it out with a Sharpie on the back of an invoice: payroll, vendors, the die shop, the guy in Ohio who fronted them blanks on a handshake.
MATT — the neighbor, who has never in his life finished a sentence and started a new one instead — is somehow in the kitchen, eating their food, offering to "know a guy." JOSH is behind him, quieter, worse ideas. Kira asks the question the season is built on: if we can't pay everybody, who do we pay?
Bobby's answer: everybody. Which means selling the thing that makes the money.
- 04
The auction
They sell the factory. Not in a montage — in a single afternoon, with a clipboard, while men Bobby has known for a decade carry his presses out on forklifts.
The last item is a hand-cut die he made himself. Nobody bids. He puts it in his truck.
That night, every creditor gets paid. Every one. The industry expected him to file, walk, and reopen under a new LLC by spring — half the room did exactly that in 2013 — and instead he wires out until the account reads a number that makes Kira put her hand over her mouth.
What is left goes into TEXITcoin.
- 05
Garage weather
INT. TWO-CAR GARAGE — AUGUST — 114°F. Nine Antminer L3s screaming on a plywood bench, box fans doing nothing, a window unit sagging out of a hole cut with a jigsaw. The house lights dim every time a machine spins up.
Samantha, seventeen, does homework at the kitchen table wearing ear defenders. Kira has stopped commenting on the electric bill because commenting requires hope.
JOHNNY — the Texas neighbor, a man who owns four welders and no shirts — turns up with a diesel generator, a trailer, and a plan so illegal it never makes it into the episode. He stays.
- 06
Booth 1147
They spend nearly everything on a launch: booth, badges, ballroom, open bar, a bespoke coin for every attendee.
Two days out, conference compliance pulls the plug on the promotion. No token talk on the expo floor, no signage, no handouts. Legal risk. Bobby argues in a hallway with a twenty-six-year-old holding a laminated badge and loses on principle and on merit.
The team spends the night hand-lettering the only thing they are allowed to say: an address, a time, and the words come find out.
- 07
The party nobody came to
INT. HOTEL BALLROOM — NIGHT. A room for four hundred. Nineteen people, six of whom flew in on Bobby's dime and three of whom are neighbors.
The band plays the full set anyway. Matt gives an unrequested twenty-minute toast that starts as a disaster and lands, accidentally, as the thesis of the show. Johnny cries at the shrimp.
Bobby works the room like it is packed, because the nineteen people who came deserve the room he promised them. Last shot: the empty tables, the good linens, and a bar tab that will show up as a plot point in three episodes.
- 08
The mine is dying
Hashrate falling. Boards cooking. Two machines dead on the bench with capacitors blown clean off. The math says they are twelve weeks from having converted a factory into a very expensive space heater.
Kira opens the hallway safe. Inside: her coins — the collection she has carried through every move, every failure, the one asset that was never on the table.
She puts them on the table. Bobby says no. It is the biggest fight of the season and neither of them raises their voice.
- 09
Shenzhen
The Bitmain World Digital Mining Summit. Bobby, in a borrowed suit, in the back row, understanding maybe forty percent of what is said.
Then a side room, half-empty, a demo nobody is excited about: a rack of hashboards fully submerged in dielectric fluid, silent, cool, running harder than anything in that garage will ever run.
He watches the tank for a full minute without speaking. The music drops out. This is the conversion scene, and it happens without a single line of dialogue.
- 10
Tank one
Building the first immersion tank out of a food-grade IBC tote, a pump from a pool-supply store, a heat exchanger Johnny welds in the driveway, and forty gallons of fluid that costs more than the truck it arrived in.
The first fill leaks. The second fill leaks. The third one holds, and the garage goes quiet for the first time in two years — not off, just quiet — and the whole family stands there listening to nothing.
Kira, tearful, furious, relieved: "That's it? That's what it sounds like?"
- 11
Bangkok
Samantha's kidney fails. The American number is impossible. The Thai number is merely brutal.
They go. Bobby runs the mine from a hospital corridor on a phone with 11% battery, on Texas time, in a country twelve hours off. Johnny and Josh keep the tanks alive by video call, doing chemistry they do not understand, at 3 a.m., correctly.
The episode's best scene is Matt — who has not shut up for the entire season — sitting with Kira in a waiting room and saying absolutely nothing for four straight minutes.
- 12
November 2024
Profitable. Not spectacularly — profitably. A spreadsheet cell turns from red to black and the whole season lands on it.
The why is the point: the orders come from the coin industry. From the dealers, the melters, the die shops, the same men who watched him pay every creditor and remembered. A guy in Ohio who was owed $40,000 and got it, buying miners.
Bobby, to the room, quietly: "We didn't earn this in the last two years. We earned it the day we paid everybody."
Season out.
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