David Rafailedes, Producer, Co-Writer
Sara Crow, Director, Co-Writer

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2023, NYU, $100k Feature Film Award / 2024, SFFILM, Science in Cinema Filmmaker Fellowship / 2024, Sundance Institute, Development Award

Project Type: Feature 

Genre: Comedy

Length: 115 pages

Field of Science: Computer Science, Blockchain Technology

Synopsis: 

On Halloween 2008, a whitepaper emerged on an obscure cryptography mailing list, authored under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, setting in motion a series of events that would introduce the world to a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. The identity of the real Satoshi Nakamoto remains a mystery.

A few months earlier, Kimi Ziegler, a brilliant, anime-loving hacktivist is about to begin her sophomore year at Stanford at only 16-years-old. She’s living her nerdy version of a teenage dream…that is, until Stanford pulls her scholarship after she hacks a professor’s medical data to prove that Big Tech should not be trusted with sensitive information. Kimi’s working-class dad Paul can’t afford to pay her tuition so Kimi is forced to drop out and return home to Chandler, Arizona.

As she packs her bags, her roommate, Raven, discovers a project Kimi is working on, a decentralized verification system for digital assets using cryptography – specifically, a better way to play Pokemon virtually. Raven points out that her Pokemon idea could actually work for something important, like digital money. Kimi dismisses this idea, but changes her tune when she arrives home to find that her father’s financial situation is more dire than she realized. Paul overextended himself on a subprime mortgage for a new house, and the bank is threatening foreclosure.

To help her dad pay the bills, Kimi gets a job at a bougie frozen yogurt shop where she meets a high schooler named Rocky with dreams of riding this minimum wage gig all the way to Wall Street. As they shill 0% fat yogurt to The 1%, Kimi and Rocky develop a friendship that revolves around Rocky’s sincere investment in the American dream and Kimi’s obsession with burning the nightmare down. The more she absorbs the wealth inequality in her own backyard, the more radicalized she becomes. She decides to redirect her Pokemon idea towards decentralized digital money and blowing up the banking system.

Along with Raven and Rocky, Kimi teams up with a disillusioned Arizona State professor and a cryogenic-obsessed software developer to invent a financial system that is secure, equitable, and doesn’t suck. But turns out, reinventing money is hard.

Satoshi is an imagined origin story about youthful idealism and how breaking the system might not turn out the way you intended.