👀 21 Capital: SoftBank sells, Tether buys

PLUS: ZEC Hits Six-Month High as SEC Ends Zcash Foundation Probe

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Cryptopolitan News
May 21, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

SoftBank had just sold its 21 Capital stake for a loss of $288 million. Tether bought every share. Now it owns the board too.

The pitch was simple - Twenty One Capital launched in December 2025. Tether's BTC treasury, get it listed on the NYSE, SoftBank involved to legitimize and offer public-market investors what they had never had an opportunity before: a firm built for Bitcoin from the ground up versus your average tech farm that pivoted into crypto.

SoftBank bought its stake for $999.3 million. By five months later, those stocks had become $711 million in value. It was Tether who purchased 100% of these on Wednesday.

The financial details were not made public, but the numbers were already apparent. During the SPAC merger mania, XXI shares peaked at $53. It now changes hands at about $7.98, an 83% decline from that peak. During that same time, Bitcoin fell from the $100K to around $77.5K and dragged XXI's valuation down with it. That's a writedown of about $288 million on an investment SoftBank had simply owned for less than six months. Still, XXIs stock spiked almost 5% on the news, increasing its market cap to $5.2 billion.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino was gracious when the news landed. SoftBank has added "institutional depth that few early-stage companies ever posses," he said. What he did not mention, but which is clear from the governance filings, is that two board seats at SoftBank also left with it. The resignations were effective immediately at closing, making XXI temporarily out of compliance with NYSE regulations regarding board composition until filling the slots.

What Tether actually controls now

No wonder Tether had already approached the table with majorities before this deal. However,multinational partner with significant stake in the business, a loud external partner makes majority ownership of the company different than own and go.

At launch, the governance structure established by XXI put Class B shares with full voting rights in Tether's hands. Outside owners primarily own Class A shares. A bitcoin sale larger than a certain size would be automatically approved, with Tether retaining control over anything related to the asset, like any major decisions around managing finances (above $1 million), mergers or acquisitions above the same value, and even appointing auditors.

SoftBank had a mini-version of those protections via its stake, which was only 20%. That stake – and the board representation that gave it a seat at the tough-table discussions – is now gone.

That is the real story here. Not the price SoftBank accepted. That the last independent oversight of Tether's plans for XXI has been removed. And whatever Tether chooses to do next, it no longer requires anyone's approval.

What Tether wants to do next

Tether released a press release explaining its growing aspirations for XXI on April 29. It plans to merge the company with two others: Strike, a Bitcoin payments app run by Jack Mallers and Elektron Energy, a Bitcoin mining firm.

On paper, the logic is hard to argue with. Strike earns revenue from payment fees and Bitcoin-backed loans (with interest rates ranging from 7.49% to 10.5% per year), which Elektron mines Bitcoin at an all-in cost of $60,000 per coin with a Bitcon controlling ~ 5% of the entire global Bitcoin network hash rate. A combination of those two with XXI's treasury of 43,514 BTC would provide the merged company with a genuine operating revenue rather than balance sheet that simply rises and falls in time with Bitcoin's price.

So right now, if Bitcoin falls down, XXI goes down with it. Cash flows exist independently of market sentiment in a combined entity with revenues from mining, payment fees, and lending. Which is a much more defensible business model than simply a bitcoin holding company that offers to raise capital in the capital markets in order to buy more bitcoin.

The complication is Jack Mallers. He is simultaneously CEO of both XXI and Strike. If the deal terms are better for shareholders of the other company than they are for shareholders of your company, well, then shareholders have every right to question just whose side you're really on. The merger must be approved by a vote of shareholders, and because there is such an obvious conflict of interest there will be heightened scrutiny.

What it also means for the bigger picture

Twenty One Capital was supposed to be the institutional-level Bitcoin treasury company, Strategy with a SoftBank brand and a narrative about mainstream credibility. Here again five months on, but an exit at a loss for its backer SoftBank serves to underline credibility vs price performance.

Tether has no need for credibility. It needs the platform. Now you are given full board control coupled with an idea of adding operating revenue via Strike and Elektron but a straighter line to something that survives the next bear as opposed to tracking it.

📊 Market Watch

1️⃣ Anthropic is on track for its first quarterly operating profit at $559 million. Its compute bill to SpaceX alone is $3.75 billion per quarter.

Anthropic has predicted $10.9 billion of revenue and an operating profit of $559 million in Q2, more than doubling Q1 revenue and 2 years ahead of the timeline it gave investors last summer.

Both Claude Code and enterprise Mythos deployments, unlike consumer subscriptions, provide the recurring revenue driving this growth. Checkout the SpaceX S-1 that shows Anthropic is paying $1.25 billion per month through 3/31/2029 for compute access across Colossus and Colossus II for an aggregate contract value of over $40 billion.

That one line of cost takes around 34 percent of quarterly revenue before any other kind of infrastructure spending. Anthropic is adding a lot of compute in H2 2026 (this will drive margins back into negative territory).

2️⃣ In November, Crypto Mom is departing the SEC. She has constructed the framework that her successor will get to work with.

Hester Peirce, the controvery-simmering SEC commissioner who spent most of her eight-year tenure leaning against the commissions enforcement-first crypto stance is set to join Regent University School of Law in Virginia as a professor of securities regulation and digital assets.

After her second term officially ended in June last year, it was only the prospect of retiring in December 2026 that awaited her. Peirce chaired Chair Atkins' Crypto Task Force, oversaw the dismissal of cases against Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken and Robinhood by SEC enforcement and spent her last months at the SEC advocating for an innovation exemption for tokenized securities trading.

Atkins is instinctively a lighter-touch regulator (and had previously hired her as counsel) and now heads the very agency she helped reshape. The crypto industry dubbed the event as a loss of its largest internal supporter.

3️⃣ SpaceX hopes to send 10,000 rockets a year. The FAA has approved 195.

In discussions with the FAA administrator, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell indicated it is seeking to scale its launches to as many as 10,000 each year within five years, a 60-fold increase over its own pace now and 40 times last year's global output. The FAA itself projects that industry-wide there will be closer to 1,000 launches in the same timeframe.

Bridging that gap means transitioning from custom launch licensing to something resembling airline-style approvals, new paradigms for airspace integration, and a Starship program that is currently running late after two test flights disintegrated in the atmosphere. A Starship test is set to take place again on May 21.

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