How I Made $5000 in the Stock Market

Twenty One Capital Debuts as a Bitcoin Play—and the Stock Drops 19%

Dec 09, 2025 16:21:00 -0500 by Nate Wolf | #Cryptocurrencies

CEO Jack Mallers admits it may take time for investors to warm up to the company. (Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Bitcoin Magazine)

Key Points

Twenty One Capital became the stock market’s newest Bitcoin company Tuesday after completing a blank-check merger with Cantor Equity Partners. Its first day wasn’t exactly a roaring success.

Shares of the company, trading under the ticker XXI, fell 19% to $11.58. It may take time for investors to warm up, CEO Jack Mallers told Barron’s.

Twenty One doesn’t look like most companies—even most crypto companies—that go public. It is flush with resources while still in its infancy as an operating business.

With more than 43,500 Bitcoin , worth $4.1 billion, Twenty One is already the third-largest public corporate holder of Bitcoin and the largest on the New York Stock Exchange. Stablecoin issuer Tether Investments and crypto exchange Bitfinex are majority owners, while SoftBank Group is a significant minority owner.

At the same time, the company has just four full-time employees and hasn’t yet laid out a public plan or timeline to launch operating businesses, Jack Mallers confirmed.

Twenty One’s performance in the coming months will indicate whether investors have an appetite for a stock that has accumulated plenty of Bitcoin but, by its own admission, isn’t doing much with it yet.

The company doesn’t envision itself as a digital asset treasury, Mallers insisted. Dozens of such treasuries have started trading publicly this year, emulating a model popularized by Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy. The idea is simply to buy and hold crypto, and to boost the amount of crypto per share.

In Strategy’s case, the stock has traded at a premium relative to its crypto holdings. By selling equity and debt, the company has funded Bitcoin purchases and raised its market value by more than the cost of those acquisitions.

But the past few months haven’t been kind to that business model. Bitcoin has dropped 26% since its October all-time high of $126,196, bringing the treasuries down with it. Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, is down almost 60% from its own record high in July. MARA Holdings, which both mines and holds Bitcoin, has seen its shares nearly halve since mid-October.

As more Strategy copycats hit the market, Mallers and his co-founders at Tether saw a need for a company built on Bitcoin reserves that can also generate meaningful operating revenue.

“We were shocked, to put it lightly, that someone like MicroStrategy was just going to simply finance buying Bitcoin just with debt forever,” he said.

Twenty One is planning to build operating businesses on top of its Bitcoin stockpile. The company is keeping these ideas close to the vest, but they could include Bitcoin credit and lending offerings, said Mallers, who also leads the Bitcoin platform Strike.

Tether’s success with the stablecoin USDT and Mallers’ experience at Strike gives the business some credibility in the crypto world, but selling investors on what remains an early-stage company could be a different proposition.

“Ultimately, like, we’ve got to prove it, right?” Mallers said of building up the company’s revenue streams. “We’re here and now we get to actually do that stuff that will make us different, not with words, but with actions.”

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com