The three-way bitcoin combination Tether spent months engineering has been cut down to a possible Twenty One-Elektron Energy pairing, and Twenty One's $2.9 billion BTC treasury is now run by Raphael Zagury.
Jack Mallers stepped down as chief executive of Twenty One Capital on 20 July and confirmed the departure publicly the following morning. His resignation coincided with Strike, the bitcoin payments firm Mallers founded, withdrawing from the three-way merger that Tether announced in April. XXI shares fell more than 18% on Tuesday, hitting a 52-week low near $4.28 before closing around $4.83.
Raphael Zagury has taken over as CEO. Zagury founded Elektron Energy, the bitcoin mining company that was the third partner in Tether's aborted combination. In effect, one of the three would-be merger partners now runs the treasury vehicle at the centre of the deal, while the piece with the actual customer base and payments product has walked out of the room.
Mallers announced the decision on X shortly after midnight UTC on 21 July, telling followers his life's work "remains Bitcoin" and that his bitcoin company is Strike.
Tether spent April explaining Twenty One as a public-market bitcoin treasury while Strike supplied users and Elektron Energy supplied hashrate. SoftBank, the last non-crypto voice on the board, was bought out in May for around $679 million. The strategic logic was, at least on paper, defensible. Without Strike, the pitch is a listed pile of bitcoin that owes 43,514 BTC to shareholders and is now led by a former miner.
Twenty One holds roughly $2.9 billion in bitcoin, which puts it among the largest corporate treasuries and comfortably ahead of every miner-turned-treasury on the tape. But XXI now trades at $4.83, down more than 84% from its 52-week high of $31.20. Investors have spent 2026 punishing bitcoin holdings companies that lack a clear operating story. Strategy has held its premium because Michael Saylor has kept issuing preferred stock and refining a capital markets thesis around it. Twenty One had Mallers and the Strike distribution promise. It now has 43,514 bitcoin and a CEO whose last full-time role was building mining rigs.
Zagury's appointment is not in itself damaging. He built Elektron Energy into a credible mining operator and understands bitcoin at a level few public-company executives do. The damaging part is the sequence. Tether announced the merger in April, bought out SoftBank at a $679 million clip in May, and by mid-July had lost both the CEO and the leg of the deal that gave the treasury a reason to exist.
Mallers' departure also says something about what founder-led bitcoin firms make of being folded into treasury vehicles. Strike is not public. It has more than 165,000 followers on its corporate account and 661,000 on Mallers' personal one. Its Lightning-native payments product predates most of its competitors. Choosing Strike over a listed treasury vehicle valued at less than half a billion dollars is not a hard call for its founder — that the choice was on the table at all is a comment on how hard Tether was pushing.
For Tether, the failure is more embarrassing than material. Twenty One never held a meaningful fraction of the group's balance sheet, and the merger was more about consolidating the public-market pieces of Tether's expanding empire than about capital efficiency. But the April announcement was pitched as the emergence of a US-listed bitcoin champion. What remains is a smaller, harder-to-explain treasury vehicle with a new CEO trying to convince markets that a bitcoin-plus-mining story is the one they should pay a premium for.
A Twenty One-Elektron Energy pairing, if it survives, would combine 43,514 bitcoin with a mining operation and a fresh pitch to the market. It would also mean the surviving structure looks less like a Wall Street-friendly treasury vehicle and more like a heavy-CapEx miner with a large bitcoin stack on the balance sheet. Public miners collectively sold a record 32,000 BTC in the first quarter to fund AI pivots because the pure-mining thesis had stopped working.
XXI opened Tuesday at $5.30 and closed at $4.83.
