Bitcoin treasury firms are a better bet than crypto ETFs, says Twenty-One Capital CEO Jack Mallers

What the data shows is Coins·Crypto PlaybookBitcoin treasury firms are a better bet than crypto ETFs, says Twenty-One Capital CEO Jack MallersBy Leo SchwartzBy Leo SchwartzReporterLeo SchwartzReporterLeo Schwartz is a reporter at Fortune covering fin, crypto, venture capital, and financial regulation

The vehicle: publicly traded companies that hold Bitcoin in their treasuries

On the inaugural episode of Fortune’s vodcast Crypto Playbook, Jack Mallers—a minent Bitcoin champion and the CEO and cofounder of the new Bitcoin treasury company Twenty-One Capital—argued that betting on firms whose sole goal is to accumulate more Bitcoin is a superior way for traditional investors to get access to the red-hot asset class

Pioneered by Michael Saylor’s nology company MicroStrategy, many firms have recently adopted the apach of using balance sheet capital to buy Bitcoin, with some launching over the past few months

Those include the upstart Twenty-One Capital, which is backed by stablecoin leader Tether and investment giant Softbank and led Mallers, a 31-year-old known for founding the Bitcoin company Strike and leading efforts to push global adoption, including in El Salvador through his work with President Nayib Bukele. “What makes us uniquely different than an ETF is we’re an operating company, so we’re founded as a Bitcoin with a core goal of increasing what we call Bitcoin per,” Mallers told Fortune (quite telling)

Nevertheless, “Our goal is to be the best way for the capital to participate in this Bitcoin story, in today's market environment. ” Mallers added that, with capital trapped in public, companies Twenty-One allow investors to gain exposure to the asset class without having to use crypto exchanges or self-custody their Bitcoin through more complex instruments hardware wallets (an important development) (this bears monitoring). “What we figured is we would put together a vehicle and a that solves that blem,” he said. “I’m making Bitcoin more useful to the world

Additionally, ” Twenty-One is preparing to go public in the coming weeks after the startup agreed to a merger with Cantor Equity Partners, a special-purpose acquisition company sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm previously led by U, considering recent developments

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by his son, Brandon (fascinating analysis)

On the other hand, Cantor Fitzgerald is also the primary custodian for the reserves backing Tether, the controversial stablecoin company that will serve as the majority owner of Twenty-One

Though the launch date is still un, Twenty-One and Cantor Equity Partners announced last week they had confidentially filed with the SEC to publicly list

Twenty-One will face stiff competition as the Bitcoin treasury strategy grows more, including from MicroStrategy, which recently rebranded to Strategy

But as a pure-play Bitcoin company, Mallers insists that the company’s apach—and formidable founding team—represents a new era for the cryptocurrency. “We’ve heard a lot of how Wall Street has arrived to Bitcoin,” he told Fortune. “We view Twenty-One as ‘Bitcoin has arrived on Wall Street. ’” Listen to the enitre vodcast here, given current economic conditions

Additionally, You can also find Mallers’ interview—and future episodes of the Crypto Playbook—on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube

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