A deal that was supposed to reshape the public Bitcoin company landscape is dead. The proposed three-way merger involving Twenty One Capital, Strike, and Elektron Energy has been officially canceled, Bloomberg reported on July 21, 2026.
Jack Mallers, who had been serving as CEO of Twenty One Capital while simultaneously running Strike, has resigned from the Twenty One role. Raphael Zagury, previously CEO of Elektron Energy, steps into Mallers’ former seat. Strike, meanwhile, walks away entirely and continues as a standalone company.
What the deal was supposed to be
The merger was first floated at the end of April 2026, roughly three months before it fell apart. The idea was to combine three distinct but complementary operations: Twenty One Capital’s publicly listed Bitcoin treasury structure, Strike’s payments infrastructure, and Elektron Energy’s mining operations.
Tether had proposed backing the combined entity with $2.1 billion in fresh credit, a number that would have given the merged company serious firepower for Bitcoin accumulation and operational scaling. Twenty One Capital trades on the NYSE under the ticker XXI and had already attracted backing from SoftBank and Cantor Equity Partners.
