Under suspicious circumstances, cryptocurrency exchanges collapse, leaving overly leveraged holders of those tokens out of pocket. It’s a depressingly familiar story in the cryptocurrency world, and one that writer-director Cutter Hodierne has made the centerpiece of his new film.
“Cold Wallet” follows everyman Billy (Raúl Castillo), telling everyone about his solid investment in the ominously named cryptocurrency exchange Tulip, splashing cash on a PS5 for his daughter and pinning his hopes on a new home in TPC tokens. It starts with a scene of two. .
Then everything falls apart. The exchange’s CEO dies under mysterious circumstances, Billy’s bag becomes useless, and the friends he brought aboard the Tulip face financial ruin. But hacker Eva (Melonie Diaz) has a clue. Tulip’s boss, Charles Hegel (Josh Brenner of “Silicon Valley”), is alive and well, hiding in a remote mansion just down the street.
The trio of unlikely vigilantes, along with Billy’s pacifist martial arts instructor Dom (Tony Cavalero), kidnap Hegel, confiscate his hardware wallet and set out to force him to cough up his missing funds.
But Hegel is not a helpless technical expert. Instead, he is more of a Hannibal Lecter figure, playing mind games with his captors, sowing seeds of doubt and pitting them against each other. Billy must wrestle with his conscience. Will he play Robin Hood and airdrop funds to impoverished investors, or will he “join the big boys” and take millions of dollars in cryptocurrency for himself?
‘Cold Wallet’ is most powerful when it pits well-drawn characters against each other. Castillo shines as Billy, embodying the Dunning-Kruger effect as every investor who doesn’t understand the financial risk he’s taking by going down the cryptocurrency rabbit hole just enough to sound convincing to his friends. And Cavalero’s Dom is especially fun to wrestle with. As a “karmic imprint” of vigilante violence.
Diaz is given the onerous and most thankless task of delivering expository material to convey the film’s cryptic concepts to mainstream audiences, but her departure from the film feels like an afterthought.
Brener’s Charles Hegel is a suitably slimy villain. Although we’ve witnessed the seedy reality of embattled cryptocurrency fraudsters like Sam Bankman-Fried, it’s hard to believe the notion that he’s a master manipulator pulling the protagonist’s strings like so many puppets. Or indeed, after a crossbow-wielding hunter commits a shocking act of violence, the film heads toward a tense finale that concludes “The Most Dangerous Game.”
The film’s small budget also limits its scope somewhat. While the fact that cryptocurrency billionaire Hegel is hiding just down the street from the protagonists in Massachusetts adds some credence, the activity is mostly confined to a single location where vigilantes take on cryptocurrency fraudsters.
Cryptocurrency Credentials
decryption Of course, readers will be most interested in the film’s treatment of cryptocurrencies.
Until now, Hollywood has portrayed cryptocurrency like computer hacking from the 90s. They sprinkled their script with technical jargon to bolster their cutting-edge credentials without really understanding how it worked (see “Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning”).
“Cold Wallet” is one of the first movies to actually use cryptocurrency mechanics to drive the plot. Lugpull motivates the protagonist, while the ins and outs of hardware wallets, airdrops, leveraged trading, and seed phrases provide the plot’s twists and turns.
It is clear that it was created by people who are deeply immersed in the cryptocurrency world. Hegel’s ‘death’ and the collapse of the TPX exchange mirror the downfall of QuadrigaCX and FTX, while his mansion features a whale motif and Boring Monkey Yacht Club NFT art. Billy and his fellow investors swap tips on Reddit and watch cryptocurrency YouTubers spout phrases like “diamond hands,” while key meetings take place in parking lots illuminated with the logos of meme stocks GameStop and AMC.
For cryptocurrency fans, it’s refreshing to see space depicted accurately on screen just once, while the general public will find it an exciting thriller, even if the cryptocurrency terminology flies over their heads.
“Cold Wallet” is also a Web3 company itself. It is one of three films being funded by the Web3 film fund Decentralized Pictures, using a grant from Steven Soderbergh. Founder Roman Coppola believes that a “new Tarantino or a new Kubrick” could eventually emerge from the Film3 universe, and based on this evidence, there’s a good chance he’ll be proven right.
Editor: Andrew Hayward
