Jack Mallers Steps Down as CEO of Twenty One Capital

The second-largest public Bitcoin treasury refreshes its strategy and confirms Strike will not merge with the company.

Twenty One Capital (XXI), the second-largest corporate Bitcoin holder in the public markets, said Monday that Chief Executive Officer Jack Mallers is stepping down, effective immediately, and will be succeeded by board member Raphael Zagury.

Mallers is leaving to focus on Strike, the Bitcoin payments company he leads, and will work with Zagury on the transition.

Twenty One also confirmed that Strike will remain standalone and will not merge into the company. That reverses part of a restructuring floated on April 29, 2026, which would have combined Twenty One, Strike, and Elektron Energy into a single Bitcoin-native platform — a plan Mallers laid out in a talk at the Bitcoin Conference that month. A potential combination of Twenty One with Elektron remains under evaluation, though the company called the talks preliminary with no assurance of a deal.

Zagury founded and leads Elektron Energy, a large-scale Bitcoin mining and infrastructure business, and spent years on Wall Street, including at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Merrill Lynch. He had served as an independent director on Twenty One's board and interim chair of its audit committee; he resigned those committee seats, effective Monday, but remains a director.

"Twenty One holds one of the largest Bitcoin balance sheets in the public markets," Zagury said. "My job is to build the operating company around it, with the discipline, governance, and executional rigor of an institution."

Alongside the leadership change, the company laid out refreshed strategic priorities centered on cash-flow generation and disciplined capital allocation. Chief among them: building and acquiring profitable operating businesses under a long-term ownership model it likened to Berkshire Hathaway.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether and a Twenty One board member, thanked Mallers for his “vision and leadership in founding Twenty One Capital, and for guiding the Company through its business combination and successful listing on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2025."

"XXI was built by Bitcoiners, for Bitcoiners," Mallers said. "As I focus my efforts fully at Strike, I look forward to watching the next phase of growth at XXI."

Twenty One was co-founded last year by Tether and Mallers and listed on the NYSE in December 2025 through a merger with a Cantor Fitzgerald blank-check company; the stock traded up as high as 500% from its IPO price intraday pre-merger under the ticker CEP. In May 2026, Tether consolidated its control by buying out SoftBank's stake, roughly 25% of the company. Twenty One holds 43,514 BTC, ranking second only to Strategy on the BitcoinTreasuries.net leaderboard of public corporate holders. Shares closed Monday at $5.32, giving the company a market capitalization of about $1.8 billion.