Jack Mallers of Twenty One Capital Talks Bitcoin Ecosystem and XXI now on NYSE ES

What's going on? Thanks for having me. How are you?

I'm good. My day's been great. We're happy to be here. I feel like Bitcoin has arrived in a way. So, for a founding team that's been in Bitcoin for over a decade, it feels good. It's a long way from my dad's basement.

Of course. Of course. A lot of what we want to build is blue chip credibility and startup upside in the capital markets. We want to be the best way for the capital markets to participate in the Bitcoin story. And so obviously that implies being listed and we're happy that day is today. It's been a lot of 'put me in, coach.' We're ready to play and today we get to start playing and we're excited about that.

A Bitcoin company. And I know that's our tagline and it sounds simple and elegant but it's unique somehow. Right. So we view it as on one side of the spectrum you've got a Coinbase or a Robinhood or a Kraken and these aren't Bitcoin companies and I'm not dissing them but they're crypto companies or they're focused on prediction markets, equities, different ways of speculating. The other side of the spectrum maybe you've got a MicroStrategy which is focused on Bitcoin but doesn't have Bitcoin-focused cash flow and products and high margin, high growth opportunities that will ride this tech sector through its inevitable disruption of legacy finance. And Tether and I, my co-founders, we've been in Bitcoin for over 10 years. And we were like, 'Huh, is there really no one that's going to focus on Bitcoin in the middle, both acquire as much Bitcoin as we possibly can because it's been the best thing you could have ever owned, and build products that focus on utility services, financial services, high margin, high growth, profit generating products.' And to our surprise, a Bitcoin company doesn't exist in the public markets. There's crypto companies, prediction market companies, there's treasury companies, and we're none of that. And so we're a Bitcoin company and we believe we're fundamentally different for that reason.

Financial services is how I think the market should think of us predominantly. Listen, a company like Robinhood or Coinbase, these businesses are monetizing things like speculation, which is fine. And you know, when you live through currency debasement and the amount of fiscal deficits and money printing that we're all living through, we're all speculators whether we know it or not. But that business implies listing tons of coins, tons of tokens, creating and hyperfinancializing markets on, you know, who's going to win the Super Bowl this year. We're totally different. And that financial services to us is who's building credit products and lending products in a lending market on top of Bitcoin? What about brokerage and institutional scale trading on top of Bitcoin? How is this asset that is now $2 trillion and we believe is going on $200 trillion, how are people going to find utility and finance their lives in an everyday sense on top of the asset class and that's our focus. So something like credit and lending, our entrance into that market is sooner rather than later and that is fundamentally different than customers that are encouraged to speculate and hyperfinancialize. Our customers are encouraged to make utility of Bitcoin itself and we want to live in that institutional realm of utility services on top of Bitcoin at least initially.

We think Bitcoin is the greatest tool and vehicle ever invented to advance the human story. And I know it sounds insane but I fundamentally believe that. Listen, money is our time and energy in an abstracted form. You go to work, you commute, you make sacrifices, you do stuff your boss tells you even though you don't want to do it. In exchange for that, you get money, right? And you use the money to both save the value that you've created for those around you and then to later exchange for the things you need like food and rent and vacation and to get married. It's so critical to a functioning society. And we feel the money is fundamentally broken. And our mission is if we can fix the money, we feel like we can fix the world. We think we can solve half the world's hardest problems. And so we think Bitcoin is the best vehicle to affect that change. And we're a company focused solely on making sure its adoption and its growth and its utility is seen in society. And again, we felt like that was missing in the market. Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin started this really novel idea that we could have better money that served the people and we didn't see many companies both advancing that very specific idea, focus on Bitcoin, and giving shareholders and investors an ability to participate in that specific idea without, you know, crypto and other distractions or, you know, treasury companies with, you know, too much leverage.