At a time when Bitcoin broke the $120,000 mark for the first time, Wall Street’s appetite is growing for new ways to hold the first—and largest—cryptocurrency. The latest vehicle: publicly traded companies that hold Bitcoin in their treasuries. On the inaugural episode of Fortune’s vodcast Crypto Playbook, Jack Mallers—a prominent 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 technology company MicroStrategy, many firms have recently adopted the approach 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 tech 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.
