At a time when Bitcoin broke the $120,000 mark for the first time, Wall Street’s appetite is growing for new ways to hold the first—and largest—cryptocurrency. The latest vehicle: publicly traded companies that hold Bitcoin in their treasuries. On the inaugural episode of Fortune’s vodcast Crypto Playbook, Jack Mallers—a prominent Bitcoin champion and the CEO and cofounder of the new Bitcoin treasury company Twenty-One Capital—argued that betting on firms whose sole goal is to accumulate more Bitcoin is a superior way for traditional investors to get access to the red-hot asset class.
Pioneered by Michael Saylor’s technology company MicroStrategy, many firms have recently adopted the approach of using balance sheet capital to buy Bitcoin, with some launching over the past few months. Those include the upstart Twenty-One Capital, which is backed by stablecoin leader Tether and tech investment giant Softbank and led Mallers, a 31-year-old known for founding the Bitcoin company Strike and leading efforts to push global adoption, including in El Salvador through his work with President Nayib Bukele.
“What makes us uniquely different than an ETF is we’re an operating company, so we’re founded as a Bitcoin business with a core goal of increasing what we call Bitcoin per share,” Mallers told Fortune. “Our goal is to be the best way for the capital markets to participate in this Bitcoin story.”
Mallers added that, with capital trapped in public markets, companies like Twenty-One allow investors to gain exposure to the asset class without having to use crypto exchanges or self-custody their Bitcoin through more complex instruments like hardware wallets. “What we figured is we would put together a vehicle and a business that solves that problem,” he said. “I’m making Bitcoin more useful to the world.”
Twenty-One is preparing to go public in the coming weeks after the startup agreed to a merger with Cantor Equity Partners, a special-purpose acquisition company sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm previously led by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by his son, Brandon. Cantor Fitzgerald is also the primary custodian for the reserves backing Tether, the controversial stablecoin company that will serve as the majority owner of Twenty-One. Though the launch date is still unclear, Twenty-One and Cantor Equity Partners announced last week they had confidentially filed with the SEC to publicly list.
Twenty-One will face stiff competition as the Bitcoin treasury strategy grows more popular, including from MicroStrategy, which recently rebranded to Strategy. But as a pure-play Bitcoin company, Mallers insists that the company’s approach—and formidable founding team—represents a new era for the cryptocurrency. “We’ve heard a lot of how Wall Street has arrived to Bitcoin,” he told Fortune. “We view Twenty-One as ‘Bitcoin has arrived on Wall Street.’”
Listen to the entire vodcast here.
You can also find Mallers’ interview—and future episodes of the Crypto Playbook—on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.