Jack Mallers resigns as Twenty One Capital CEO after Tether three-way merger collapses

Jose Antonio Lanz Tue, July 21, 2026 at 9:06 AM PDT 3 min read

• BTC-USD +1.66%
• XXI -10.89%
• USDT-USD +0.02%

Jack Mallers has stepped down as CEO of Twenty One Capital, and investors reacted negatively.

Shares of the Bitcoin treasury company—a publicly traded firm that holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, allowing regular investors to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency without buying it directly—dropped nearly 15% on Tuesday.

Mallers co-founded Twenty One alongside Tether, the issuer of USDT, the world's most widely used dollar-pegged stablecoin. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2025 through a SPAC merger.

Twenty One still holds 43,514 BTC. At current prices, that balance sheet is worth more than $4 billion, ranking it second among all public companies for Bitcoin holdings, behind only Michael Saylor's Strategy.

The merger that never happened

Mallers' exit comes alongside worse news. Tether's plan to merge three Bitcoin businesses into a single publicly traded entity has officially collapsed, according to Bloomberg. The proposed combination would have united:

• Twenty One's treasury operations
• Strike's Bitcoin payments and lending platform (operating in more than 100 countries)
• Elektron Energy's mining infrastructure

Tether first pitched the idea in April 2026 at the Bitcoin Conference, and Mallers endorsed it publicly. As Decrypt reported, the deal was billed as a move to create "the premier listed Bitcoin company in the world," combining mining, payments, and treasury management in one stock. Mallers was set to lead the combined entity; Elektron Energy founder Raphael Zagury was slated to become president.

That structure is now abandoned. Strike will remain a standalone company. Twenty One and Elektron are still in early discussions about a potential two-way deal, but no agreement has been confirmed or guaranteed.

Mallers kept his statement brief on X: "This wasn't an easy decision, but it was the right one. My life's work remains Bitcoin. My Bitcoin company is Strike. The work continues."

Raphael Zagury—founder of Elektron Energy and a former managing director at Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch, and a vice president at Goldman Sachs—has been named the new CEO. His message to investors differs sharply from Mallers'.

Where Mallers built Twenty One's identity around aggressive Bitcoin accumulation, Zagury is promising institutional discipline. Per Tether's official announcement, Zagury said Twenty One "should be measured by the cash flow it generates and the discipline with which it allocates capital."

Bitcoin treasury companies as a category have faced growing skepticism since their initial surge. Twenty One shares hit a 52-week high of $31.51 before sliding to a low of $4.81. In May 2026, Tether moved to consolidate control by buying out SoftBank's roughly 25% stake—a position the Japanese investment giant had originally paid $999.3 million to acquire.

Story continues