Jack Mallers’ Twenty One Capital has climbed to second place among publicly traded Bitcoin treasury companies after miner MARA sold a large portion of its holdings and slipped to third.
Twenty One Capital now holds 43,514 BTC in its corporate treasury, valued at over $2.9 billion at current prices.
The company went public late last year following its business combination with Cantor Equity Partners, a special purpose acquisition company, and now trades under the ticker XXI on the NYSE — though shares are down more than 25% year-to-date.
MARA sells $1.1B in bitcoin
MARA sold 15,133 BTC, valued at roughly $1.1 billion, throughout March 2026 to purchase its own debt at a discount.
The next largest publicly traded holder is Japanese treasury company Metaplanet with 35,100 BTC, while Strategy remains far ahead in first place with 762,099 BTC.
Bitcoin Treasuries analyst Tyler Rowe commented on MARA’s situation:
“MARA borrowed aggressively to stack sats during the bull run and is now selling Bitcoin at a loss to service that debt. This is the precise scenario critics of debt-fueled treasury strategies have warned about.”
Rowe also questioned whether miners can sustainably operate as Bitcoin treasury companies without the capital markets infrastructure that Strategy spent five years building.
Debt-fueled strategies under pressure
MARA’s approach stands in sharp contrast to Strategy’s model, which treats BTC as “perpetual digital credit,” using it as collateral to continually finance further acquisitions.
Some market observers see the shift as a sign of capitulation among crypto treasury and mining companies, worsened by a bear market that began in October 2025 and declining share prices.
Analysts had warned of a shakeout
In June 2025, venture capital firm Breed warned that only a few crypto treasury companies would survive the “death spiral” of contracting market net asset values.
As cheap financing dries up, companies trading at or below their net asset value face pressure to sell holdings to meet debt obligations.
Deng Chao, CEO of HashKey Capital, told Cointelegraph that companies treating crypto holdings as a speculative bet rather than a long-term play were likely to capitulate between cycles, while those with a disciplined treasury strategy would endure.
