07-27-2026 
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of CoinGeek.
Jack Mallers quit on a Monday.
- Mallers exits as treasury bet falters
- After years, the market catches up
- Who really controls the boardroom?
- The premium driving Bitcoin treasuries
On July 21, 2026, the founding CEO of Twenty One Capital (NASDAQ: XXI) stepped down effective immediately, handing the company over to Raphael Zagury, who also runs Elektron Energy. The official story is a strategy dispute: Mallers wanted to build cash-flowing BTC businesses, and the board wanted a pure treasury vehicle. A vault with a ticker symbol. Vaults produce nothing, and the market has finally noticed.
His farewell was gracious, and its last line was a confession: “Strike is where I carry it forward.”
The founder of one of the largest BTC treasury companies on Earth just told you the mission lives somewhere else.
The same day, CoinDesk reported that Tether’s plan to merge Twenty One, Strike, and Elektron Energy into one grand bitcoin conglomerate had collapsed, with Strike staying independent. XXI fell more than 18% that day to a record low of $4.46 per Stocktwits’ news desk, roughly 90% below its May 2025 all-time high near $47.
One post on X compressed the entire Mallers era into a single line.
From the launch to his final day. Mallers was not even the biggest treasury funeral of the day.
That same Monday, shareholders of Satsuma Technology (LSE: SATS), the Mark Moss-backed British treasury company, voted by more than 90% to sell all remaining 668 BTC (about $44 million), return the capital to shareholders, and cancel the London listing. The stock had fallen more than 99% from its June 2025 peak. In August 2025, Satsuma raised £163.6 million ($218.3 million) in an oversubscribed convertible round led by ParaFi. Eleven months later, the shareholders voted the company out of existence.
Oversubscribed to liquidate in under a year. Not exactly a durable asset thesis.
Per Artemis data cited by Bloomberg on June 5, 2026, the sector’s combined market value fell from about $134 billion at the October 2025 peak to about $72 billion. Sixty-two billion dollars, gone. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy, NASDAQ: MSTR) holds more than 843,700 BTC at an average cost of $75,699 per coin. With BTC near $60,000 in the June 2026 reporting, the entire stash sits underwater, and the market cap has fallen from a $102.2 billion peak to about $45.6 billion. Per CoinDesk on March 17, 2026, roughly 40% of publicly traded BTC treasuries now trade at a discount to their own net asset value.
The small fry are simply leaving. MARA Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA) sold more than 15,000 BTC in March 2026, mostly to retire debt, and K Wave Media (NASDAQ: KWM) and Genius Group (NASDAQ: GNS) sold every last coin they held this year to repay debts, per Crypto Times on July 2, 2026. The exits look less like a panic and more like an audit.
I have been throwing rocks at this since 2021
In a CoinGeek interview in May 2021, I mused that MicroStrategy was becoming some kind of crypto mutual fund, since its CEO seemed far more interested in talking about BTC, and described the speculation economy as “promises and hype backing up multiple layers of promises and hype.”
In July 2022, I ran the South Sea Bubble parallel with Michael Saylor cast as Isaac Newton, complete with Saylor’s own December 2013 tweet: “#Bitcoin days are numbered. It seems like just a matter of time before it suffers the same fate as online gambling.” The man is nothing if not flexible!
By June 2025, I was saying it plainly: “By rebranding MicroStrategy as a ‘Bitcoin treasury company,’ Saylor leveraged the same playbook as Ponzi, Madoff, and SBF.” And: “As long as BTC rises, he looks like a genius. But if BTC falters, the entire MicroStrategy house of cards crumbles.”
And in May 2026, writing about Strategy’s buy-and-hold-everything thesis, I said the quiet part: “That is not peer-to-peer electronic cash. That is a hedge fund in a hoodie, which might actually be a good name for a punk band led by Jack Mallers…”
Five years of throwing rocks, and now the tide is throwing them with me. Strange feeling. Usually, I have to wait longer.
Twenty One was never a startup
Which brings us back to XXI, because the interesting part was never Mallers. Twenty One was announced in April 2025 as a venture of Tether, SoftBank Group, and Mallers, birthed through a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners (NASDAQ: CEPO), a vehicle sponsored by a Cantor Fitzgerald (NASDAQ: CFCIX) affiliate. Majority-owned by Tether and Bitfinex, it began trading on the NYSE on December 9, 2025, holding more than 43,500 BTC. On May 20, 2026, Tether bought out SoftBank’s entire 26% stake, a position worth roughly $679 million at the time (the price paid was not disclosed), and SoftBank’s board representatives resigned at closing.
So when “the board” overruled the founder and chose vault over business, remember who the board answers to: Tether and Bitfinex, holding the whole cap table. How’s that for a decentralized revolution?
On July 22, 2026, one day after Mallers walked, Bloomberg published an investigation by Anthony Cormier, David Kocieniewski, and Annie Massa: “How Tether Benefited as Trump Insiders Shaped First US Crypto Law.”
Let’s follow the money. Howard Lutnick, before becoming Commerce Secretary, was chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm that manages Tether’s assets, and Bloomberg reports he acted as a crisis manager for Tether through 2024. In April 2024, Cantor acquired the right to a 5% stake in Tether via a $600 million convertible bond, a price Tether chairman Giancarlo Devasini described to a business associate as “bloody cheap,” per contemporaneous notes recounted in court filings by BTC entrepreneur Cory Klippsten. On Tether’s own reported 2024 profits, that stake was worth more than $6 billion on paper. One of Klippsten’s notes, recounted in a court filing and reported by Bloomberg, has Devasini saying: “According to Howard Lutnick, he managed to kill every bill about stablecoins, crypto, etc.”
In the GENIUS Act negotiations, White House crypto aide Bo Hines pushed to keep the law’s three-year grace period when Democrats wanted 18 months, calling it a “red line” for the White House, per three people familiar with the talks. United States President Donald Trump signed the bill in July 2025. Tether hired Hines for an executive role in August 2025. ONE MONTH. He was soon promoted to CEO of Tether’s US product, USAT. In October 2025, as Lutnick’s children’s trusts bought out his multibillion-dollar business interests, Tether loaned one of those trusts an undisclosed sum, revealed in a New York filing the day after the sale closed.
The people selling you the vehicle were also writing the rules of the road.
This is the same Tether that, alongside Bitfinex, paid $61 million in 2021 to settle Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and New York State claims that it misled investors about its reserves, and that remains banned from operating in New York. The same Tether whose token, per Elliptic data cited by Bloomberg, was purchased to the tune of $507 million by the sanctioned Central Bank of Iran in 2025, flowed to Russian sanctions-evasion platforms at a clip of almost $2.5 billion in July 2025 alone, and moved more than $4 billion through illicit marketplaces favored by Chinese scam networks in 2026 alone.
The “bitcoin treasury company” was never about bitcoin. It was financial engineering for absorbing fiat wealth into insiders’ pockets, with bitcoin as the bait instead of the tool. Bitcoin was supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash: commerce, micropayments, businesses built on-chain, creating value that could not exist before. They took the most important monetary invention of our lifetime and turned it into a warehouse receipt.
But they’re just buying the dip, right?
I can hear it already: BTC always comes back, the treasuries are accumulating at a discount, “Zoom out, Kurt!”
Maybe. Maaaybe.
A treasury company is not Bitcoin. It is a leveraged wrapper, and the wrapper has its own physics. The model only works while the stock trades above the value of its coins: at a premium, the company sells shares, buys BTC, and every share ends up backed by more coins. Financial alchemy! Number go up.
At a discount, the machine runs in reverse. Issuing shares below net asset value destroys the existing holders, the debt still needs servicing, and the only honest move left is the one Satsuma’s shareholders just made: sell the coins, pay the people back, turn off the lights. That is not a dip to buy. That is a queue at the exits.
A stock trading below its own assets is the market pricing the management layer at less than nothing, and shareholders are increasingly doing that math out loud, 90% of votes cast at a time.
These companies produce nothing: no product, no customers, no cash flow. What they have is a pile of coins, a management fee, and a story. Strip away the story, and you are paying insiders for the privilege of holding bitcoin through a middleman.
Zero is not a price target so much as a purpose statement.
Markets eventually price companies at the value of what they produce, and the honest number for a vault with a ticker symbol is nothing at all. The founder has already left the building. The insiders already got paid. Satsuma’s shareholders just had the decency to vote for it.
The treasury companies really are going to zero.
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
Watch | Unlocking crypto futures: Key takeaways from Blockchain Futurist 2025
Recommended for you
