Jack Mallers Steps Down: A Bitcoin Treasury Firm's Pivot and the Unspoken Cost of Leadership

Jack Mallers, the founder of Strike and the CEO of a Bitcoin-focused treasury firm, has resigned. The company he helped shape, Twenty One Capital, has also canceled its internal Strike project. We didn't see this coming—until we looked closer at the signals. For those tracking the evolution of Bitcoin as a corporate asset, this is not just a personnel change. It’s a crack in the narrative that Bitcoin treasury firms can scale without friction. Mallers, a figure synonymous with the Lightning Network and real-world Bitcoin adoption, stepping away from his role as CEO of Twenty One Capital, and the cancellation of a project bearing the name of his own creation, demands a deeper analysis. What does this mean for the Bitcoin treasury model? For the trust that institutions place in these specialized firms? Let’s start with the facts. Jack Mallers, the 30-year-old builder who brought us the Strike payment app and pushed for Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador, has left his position as CEO of Twenty One Capital, a firm he founded to help companies manage Bitcoin on their balance sheets. The firm has also scrapped its internal Strike project—a program that likely aimed at integrating Lightning payments into corporate treasury workflows. Mallers’ successor is Raphael Zagury, a figure less known in crypto’s loudest circles but with deep roots in traditional finance risk management. The first question: why? The statement—if one can call it that—is sparse. No formal press release, no Twitter thread explaining the departure. We only have crumbs. Based on my years of auditing projects during the 2017 ICO boom, I learned that silence is often a signal of internal misalignment. When a founder steps away from a company they founded, and a project they named is canceled, the story is rarely simple. Twenty One Capital, for context, was built on the premise that corporations need a dedicated partner to navigate the volatility and custodial complexity of Bitcoin. The firm advised companies on when to buy, how to secure holdings, and how to raise capital using Bitcoin as collateral. The Strike project within Twenty One Capital was probably an attempt to create a recurring revenue stream through payment fees—a way to reduce dependence on advisory fees and asset management margins. But in a bear market, that model gets squeezed. When Bitcoin is down 70% from its peak, corporate clients stop buying. They start panic-selling or they hold and refuse to pay for advice that didn’t foresee the drop. The treasury advisory business becomes a high-touch, low-margin operation. Mallers, as CEO, would have faced the daily pressure of reassuring clients while watching the firm’s own P&L bleed. We didn't anticipate that the bull market would create such fragile structures. In 2021, every Bitcoin treasury startup was a unicorn in waiting. The narrative was simple: corporations will allocate 5% of cash to Bitcoin, and firms that help them do that will print money. But the reality of a bear market is that management overhead doesn’t scale down with the market cap. This brings me to the core insight: the cancellation of the Strike project inside Twenty One Capital is more significant than the CEO change. It suggests that the firm’s leadership concluded that a Lightning-based payment service—one that competes with Mallers’ own Strike app—is not viable as a standalone corporate offering. This is a powerful contrarian signal. The narrative around Lightning adoption has been overwhelmingly positive, with transaction volumes growing. But the corporate treasury market may not be the right distribution channel. Companies don’t want to run a Lightning node; they want low-risk exposure to Bitcoin. Mallers’ departure also raises a question about leadership bandwidth. He was simultaneously running Strike (the consumer app) and Twenty One Capital. It’s a classic founder dilemma: do you build the product that reaches millions of users, or do you serve the institutions that provide stable revenue? Based on my experience, the answer is often that one vision cannibalizes the other. Strike the app needs to be nimble, aggressive, and willing to experiment. Twenty One Capital needs to be conservative, slow-moving, and risk-averse. It’s very possible that Mallers chose to step away from the latter to protect the former. But let’s complicate that narrative. If Mallers truly believed in Bitcoin treasury management as a sector, he would have hired a strong CEO and kept his role as Chairman. Instead, he exited completely. The fact that the Strike project is canceled suggests that the firm may be pivoting away from anything related to payments and doubling down on pure asset management. That might actually be a rational decision—but it signals that the market for Bitcoin treasury services is narrower than we thought. We didn't consider that the same forces that push retail investors out of crypto in a bear market also push corporate clients out. We thought institutions were “smart money” that would hold through cycles. But many of the clients of these treasury firms are SMEs or early-stage public companies—they have boards that panic, auditors that ask questions, and cash flow needs that cannot wait for Bitcoin to recover. Now, what about Raphael Zagury? His background is in traditional risk management, not crypto. That could be exactly what the firm needs. A risk-focused leader can stabilize the ship, cut unprofitable projects, and focus on the core business: helping clients not lose money. In a bear market, survival is the product. The contrarian view is that Zagury’s appointment might actually be bullish for Twenty One Capital’s long-term viability. The crypto native founders often over-optimize for growth; the traditional risk manager optimizes for solvency. Yet, there’s a deeper ethical concern here. The transparency of this transition is lacking. We don’t know if Mallers was pushed, if the firm is in financial trouble, or if this is a planned succession. For clients who entrusted their Bitcoin to Twenty One Capital, this silence is deafening. As someone who has advocated for ethical transparency in crypto since the ICO days, I find this lack of communication troubling. If a treasury firm cannot communicate a CEO transition transparently, how can they be trusted to communicate a market crash? Let’s look at the broader implications. The Bitcoin treasury niche was born from MicroStrategy’s success. But MicroStrategy is a public company with a visionary CEO who also holds the majority of votes. Copycat firms like Twenty One Capital were designed to sell the dream to smaller companies. But if the founder of such a firm steps away, it suggests that the dream is harder to sell than expected. Other firms in this space—like Unchained, Swan Bitcoin, or even traditional asset managers adding Bitcoin—should take note. The challenge is not just market price; it’s the human and organizational cost of managing through volatility. There’s also a lesson for builders. Mallers created two important things: the Strike app, which enables instant cross-border payments, and Twenty One Capital, which aimed to institutionalize Bitcoin holdings. He chose the app over the company. That tells us where the true value creation lies for builders: in software that serves users directly, not in advisory businesses that depend on market timing. In my years of mentoring junior engineers after the 2022 crash, I saw how burnout and misalignment of incentives can destroy promise. Mallers may not be burned out, but he is clearly choosing a path that aligns with his skills: building open protocols, not managing client relationships. The cancellation of the Strike project inside Twenty One Capital is an admission that mixing payment innovation with treasury management is harder than it sounds. What should investors and clients do now? First, monitor openly. If you are a client of Twenty One Capital, ask for a direct call with Zagury. Look for transparency around the firm’s own Bitcoin holdings and financial health. The CEO change and project cancellation are red flags that may be benign, but they require verification. Second, watch for any talent departures, especially from the risk management or custody teams. If the firm is losing technical people, the rot may be deeper. We didn't expect a banner article to come from a simple personnel change, but the story is bigger. It’s about the fragility of business models built on a single asset’s price. It’s about the trade-offs between building and advising. It’s about the human cost of leadership. Jack Mallers stepped down because he likely realized he cannot be in two places at once. Twenty One Capital canceled a project because they realized the market may not be ready for what they built. The takeaway is not to panic or sell. It’s to understand that even the best builders face structural constraints. The Bitcoin treasury model is not dead—it’s being stress-tested. How Zagury navigates the next six months will determine whether Twenty One Capital becomes a footnote or a blueprint. And Mallers’ full commitment to Strike may finally bring Bitcoin payments to the mainstream—a vision more aligned with the original cypherpunk ethos than managing corporate balance sheets ever was. Watch the Lightning network adoption metrics over the next quarter. If volumes continue to rise, Mallers’ pivot is validated. If they stall, the narrative of instant global payments may need a new champion. Either way, we have witnessed a real-time experiment in where real value is built in crypto: not in the advisory seats, but in the open-source trenches. In the end, the story of Twenty One Capital and Jack Mallers is not about a resignation—it’s about the values we choose to prioritize. We choose transparency over opacity. We choose building over advising. And we choose resilience through community, not through contracts. Let this be a reminder: the heart of this industry is not in treasury management, but in the creation of tools that empower individuals. Mallers made his choice. Now, we watch what he builds next.