Jack Mallers: How We Started Our Bitcoin Treasury Company

It’s hard to believe Jack Mallers is still only 31. The Bitcoin star has already founded several companies (including Strike and Zap) and had a hand in getting El Salvador to adopt BTC as legal tender, the first country to do so. Now, he’s forming a bitcoin treasury company — Twenty One — to rival the biggest on the market.

Speaking to CoinDesk recently for an interview, Mallers explained how his new company came about (through friendship) and what motivates him about bitcoin’s continued advance to the heart of capital markets.

Mallers said the idea for Twenty One came out of a Telegram group chat with executives at Tether. Mallers is a long-time friend of Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether, which now has its headquarters in El Salvador.

“We've overlapped on similar projects, whether it's open source, bitcoin development, El Salvador, just ways that we can push the world in what we believe is the right direction. And so Twenty One is kind of the latest iteration of that,” Mallers said.

“We were watching the story [of evolve and we're like, ‘surely there's gonna be, you know, blue chip, credible Bitcoin treasury company, which just means you're capitalized on Bitcoin.’”

“At a certain point we kind of started to challenge each other on like, should we do [a Bitcoin treasury company]? … And it came to a point of, you know, if no one is going to build it, you know, why not us?”“Friends should be the change they wanted to see in the world.”

Twenty One came together within weeks of Mallers and Ardoino deciding to go ahead. It was joined by SoftBank, which came on as a launch partner.

“They wanted to put in a billion bucks and we said, ‘well, we're a bitcoin company, so we're taking your contribution in bitcoin.’ I don't think in dollars, I think in Bitcoin. So at the time, a billion dollars was 10,500 Bitcoins. And so they denominated their contribution in Bitcoin.”

It plans to launch with at least 2,000 Bitcoin, making it the third-largest Bitcoin treasury in the world.

Mallers originally went down the rabbit hole after his ad, a futures trader, explained how money really worked to him. He described how the debasement of money through government printing and inflation is still what drives him on. Depoliticizing the issuance of money will set us free.

“My message [is] Bitcoin before its computer code, before it's an asset, before it's an ETF, to me, it's moral code. Bitcoin is, you shall not censor, you shall not inflate, you shall not confiscate, you shall not counterfeit and you shall not steal,” Mallers said.

“Bitcoin not as a bunch of Miami Club hedge fund bros. Think of it as ethical, moral code that we're all working on to create a place in this world where we can safely exist,” he said.