How Jack Mallers and His Band of Merry Cryptonauts Lassoed a Billion for Bitcoin 🤑

Picture, if you dare, the inescapably youthful Jack Mallers—an embryonic thirty-one!—springing forth like a digital Icarus, wings forged from code and sheer conviction. The chap has summoned into existence not one, not two, but a veritable bouquet of companies (Strike, Zap, and now, insert drumroll, Twenty One!). One can only assume his breakfast cereal is fortified with entrepreneurial vitamins and pure Satoshi.

Martinis with CoinDesk (figuratively, alas) and Mallers, vivid as a phosphorescent moth, lets slip that the inception of his most recent brainchild was marinated not in S&P spreadsheets but in the effervescent chaos of a Telegram group chat—a cybernetic watering hole populated with Tether’s pallid executives. Friendship, my dear reader, is the only currency that hyperinflates with use.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, soulmate-in-bitcoin, and, dare I say, Jack’s co-conspirator against fiat monotony, now presides in El Salvador—so fashionable for its adoption of BTC, so out-of-fashion for its adoption of, well, everything else.

“We’ve danced together before!” chirped Mallers, his syntax valiantly leaping hurdles. “Open source, Bitcoin conjuring, Salvadoran experiments—a united urge to nudge the globe (gently or not) towards what we blithely presume is ‘right.’ Twenty One, you see, is just the freshest mask on this benevolent heist.”

Events unfolded as all great epics do: a group squinting at the Bitcoin horizon, pondering, “Whence cometh a gold-plated, blue-chip, no-nonsense BTC treasury firm? Why not us?” There may have been snacks. There were definitely existential side-eyes.

So, with all the deliberation of a sneeze, Mallers and friends flung together Twenty One in mere weeks. As the pièce de résistance: SoftBank entered the ballroom, checkbook akimbo, offering a cool billion in old staid dollars. Mallers waved it off. “Bitcoin, or bust, amigos!” And so 10,500 coins changed virtual hands—because who among us thinks in dollars any longer? (If you do, seek help, or at least a Coinbase account.)

Their launch, rumored to involve a battalion of at least 2,000 Bitcoins, will catapult them to the pantheon of the planet’s Bitcoin treasuries. Third place: bronze medal, but pure digital gold. 🏅

Jack’s journey began, as most hero’s journeys do, in the shadow of a parental oracle: his father, dealer in futures, whispered the actual secrets of money, inflation, and the giddy debasement of currency by governments who print with the abandon of sugar-rushed toddlers.

“Before it is code—before it is ticker, ETF, talking-point—Bitcoin is a commandment,” declaimed Jack, all staccato and vim. “Thou shalt not inflate! Nor counterfeit! Nor, for the love of all things hashed, steal. Amen.”

Mallers implores you: eschew the Miami Club stereotypes. BTC isn’t merely a pet project for hedge fund fauna—no, it’s the last, best hope for moral code in a synthetic jungle.

And thus, with bonhomie, blockchain, and a certain winking audacity, Jack and his cabal invite you to witness their latest high-wire act—preferably with popcorn and private keys at the ready.

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