Tether Buys SoftBank's 26% XXI Stake, VerifiedX Launches Native BTC on Base

Bitcoin News

Tether has deepened its grip on one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin holders by acquiring SoftBank Group's roughly 26% stake in Twenty One Capital. The stablecoin issuer disclosed the move on Wednesday without naming a price, ending the Japanese conglomerate's role as an early backer of the firm Cantor Fitzgerald helped launch in 2025 under chief executive Jack Mallers. SoftBank's representatives will step down from the board, consolidating governance under Tether and granting it decisive influence over Twenty One Capital's long-term direction. The transaction lands at a delicate moment for listed Bitcoin treasuries, where price weakness compresses net asset value and complicates equity raises without dilution.

Twenty One Capital used the same news cycle to lay out a wider mandate, signaling it will evolve from a pure Bitcoin treasury vehicle into a full-stack Bitcoin financial services platform. Management framed the next phase around lending against Bitcoin collateral, integrated mining operations and capital markets activities, aiming to actively monetize its balance sheet rather than simply hold it. That repositioning mirrors a broader push across listed Bitcoin proxies to build durable revenue lines as raw treasury arbitrage narrows. With Tether's payments rails, dollar-backed liquidity and global reach now firmly in the cap table, XXI gains an unusually deep counterparty for the lending and market-making ambitions it has just announced.

Markets received the ownership shake-up with cautious approval. XXI shares climbed roughly 4% on Wednesday morning, partially repairing damage from a 37% drawdown since the stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in December following the business combination that created the company. The firm's Bitcoin treasury is currently valued near $3.34 billion, anchoring enterprise value tightly to spot price action. As the leading Bitcoin proxy under fresh control, XXI now faces the dual test of executing its services pivot while navigating a sideways tape that has compressed mNAV multiples across the publicly listed treasury cohort.

A separate institutional push surfaced on Coinbase's Base network, where the VerifiedX foundation went live with vBTC.b, a bitcoin asset designed for redemption directly into native BTC rather than relying on a synthetic wrapper or trusted federation. The launch arrives with a Halborn full-stack audit and an immediate listing on Fireblocks with self-custody enabled, two markers institutional desks typically require before allocating. With Bitcoin still commanding only around $5 billion of total value locked across DeFi versus more than $43 billion on Ethereum, the team is positioning vBTC.b as a credible route to close that capital gap on a major EVM layer.

The Fireblocks integration is the piece regulated custodians have been waiting on. Treasury teams, asset managers and crypto-native funds can now hold and move vBTC.b alongside their other digital assets under existing policy frameworks, then route it into Base-based blockchain applications without surrendering custody. Use cases highlighted include programmable settlement, collateralized borrowing, structured yield strategies and emerging AI-agent commerce flows, all settled on a chain whose growth has outpaced peer Layer-2s this cycle. For desks reluctant to touch wrapped Bitcoin formats burdened with bridge or federation risk, the native redemption guarantee is the differentiator the launch is leaning on most heavily.

Underpinning the architecture is a FROST multi-party computation network handling threshold signatures across an open node set, which the team argues sets a higher decentralization bar than competing wrapped formats. Combined with native zero-knowledge proofs on the VerifiedX chain, users moving BTC in and out of the system gain a meaningful privacy buffer against onchain analytics and front-running bots that routinely target large flows. The design choice signals a deliberate departure from custodial bridges, aligning with self-custody narratives reinforced by recent cold wallet migration trends. Whether organic Bitcoin demand follows the technology will ultimately determine how the launch is judged.

Bitcoin is trading near $77,505 with a modest 0.85% daily gain, holding a sideways range as bulls and bears trade blows. The first line of defense sits at $76,817, followed by deeper supports at $75,080 and $72,673; a clean break below the latter would invalidate the consolidation thesis and expose lower bands. Resistance starts at $78,595, with $80,475 and the $82,850 ceiling as upside hurdles. RSI at 48 reflects neutral momentum, while a bearish MACD signal warns rallies remain corrective until reclaimed. A close above $80,475 would shift bias decisively bullish; failure to defend $75K reopens downside risk to the broader bull market structure.