From a Lightning Network payments app to a NYSE-listed treasury, a $2.1 billion lending machine, and a three-way merger that could define public Bitcoin markets for a generation this is the Jack Mallers story in 2026.
In 2021, Jack Mallers walked onto a conference stage in Miami and announced that El Salvador was adopting Bitcoin as legal tender. He was 27 years old. The room erupted. Within hours the news was on every front page in the world. It was the moment that turned a promising Chicago entrepreneur into a genuine force in global finance and it was only the beginning.
Five years later, Mallers runs two companies simultaneously. Strike, the Bitcoin financial services platform he founded in 2020, now operates in more than 100 countries.
Twenty One Capital, the NYSE-listed Bitcoin treasury firm he leads, holds 43,500 BTC on its balance sheet the third-largest public corporate Bitcoin position on earth, behind only Strategy and MARA Holdings. Tether, SoftBank, and Cantor Fitzgerald are his backers. The New York Stock Exchange is his venue. And a proposed three-way merger that would combine everything under one listed roof is sitting with the SEC.
"Bitcoin is the closest thing we have to reflecting global financial health. It's traded 24/7 all over the world."
— Jack Mallers, June 2026
His thesis has not changed since day one. Bitcoin is honest money in a dishonest system. While central banks distort signals and equity markets float on policy support, Bitcoin trades around the clock with no intervention and no narrative management. When global liquidity tightens, Mallers argues, institutions dump their most liquid assets first. "You sell what you can, not what you want," he said this month. Bitcoin moves first not because it is fragile, but because it is the most transparent market in existence. It is, in his words, a smoke alarm for the global financial system. Right now, it is going off.
At the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas in late April, Mallers unveiled the next phase of Strike's product suite built in partnership with Tether and anchored by a $2.1 billion credit facility. The headline product is a "volatility-proof" Bitcoin-backed loan: holders borrow against their Bitcoin at up to 50% loan-to-value, pay a fee, and Strike eliminates the risk of forced liquidation entirely regardless of price swings. Rates run from 10.5% APR for smaller borrowers down to 7.49% for clients above $5 million. Quarterly proof-of-reserve audits and on-chain segregated collateral give institutional clients the transparency they require.
The message to every Bitcoin holder is the same: never sell. Borrow instead.
The same week, Tether published a proposal to merge Twenty One Capital with Strike and Elektron Energy a Bitcoin mining operator running roughly 5% of the entire network's hashrate. If completed, the combined entity would be the first publicly listed company to own Bitcoin's entire vertical stack: treasury, mining, payments, lending, and capital markets, all under one SEC-regulated roof. "Simply put, I think it's a great idea," Mallers said from the conference stage. No financial terms have been disclosed. A shareholder vote and SEC review stand between the proposal and completion. But the direction of travel has not been clearer.
JPMorgan once closed his personal bank accounts without explanation, citing "concerning activity." He built a NYSE-listed company in response. The bank still has not commented. Mallers, for his part, does not appear to be waiting.
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