Jack Mallers is building a Bitcoin company that looks exactly like a bank. His plan to merge payments app Strike with Tether's mining division, Electron Energy, creates a vertically integrated titan that controls energy, mining, custody, and lending. The goal, Mallers argued at Bitcoin 2026, is to fix the market split between 'crypto casinos' and passive treasury holders. The new entity would funnel all operating income into buying more Bitcoin.
"This integration allows the company to secure the network while producing the commodity at the lowest possible cost."
- Jack Mallers, Bitcoin 2026
Tether's capital is the engine. The stablecoin giant is providing a $2.1 billion credit facility and folding its mining business - representing roughly 5% of global hash rate - into the venture. This pivot moves Tether from financial facilitator to primary producer and lender of last resort. A key product is volatility-proof loans, where users pay a fee for a guarantee their Bitcoin collateral won't be liquidated during a flash crash.
Simultaneously, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino is deploying capital toward a more radical, decentralized vision he calls the 'Resilience Stack.' Modeled on Asimov's Foundation, it's a suite of open-source, serverless protocols designed to outlive failing institutions. The stack includes Holepunch for communication and a Wallet Development Kit (WDK) to enable self-custody for humans and AI agents.
"The gap between the connected and the excluded will widen 100x as AI becomes the primary driver of economic value."
- Paolo Ardoino, Bitcoin 2026
Ardoino warns that 4 billion people excluded from traditional finance will be left further behind by subscription-based AI. His solution is to push intelligence to the edge, with local AI models on smartphones that can transact over the Lightning Network. Tether reports 573 million users across its products, adding 34 million wallets per quarter, giving this infrastructure a massive built-in user base.
While Mallers and Ardoino build new stacks, Lightspark CEO David Marcus is bridging Bitcoin to the existing world. His company, now a principal Visa member, launched the Grid Global Account. It lets platforms embed dollar accounts settled on Bitcoin, instantly spendable at 175 million Visa merchants. Marcus frames it as turning cross-border payouts from a cost center into a revenue stream, with AI agent delegation built in.
The consolidation faces skepticism. Analyst David Bennett sees Mallers's merger as the old legacy finance playbook of M&A applied to a decentralized movement. He argues it creates a Bitcoin bank that resembles the centralized institutions the network was meant to disrupt. The tension is clear: one vision consolidates power and cash flow under a Tether-backed banner; the other seeks to atomize it across a peer-to-peer stack. Both are betting billions that the current financial system is terminally dimming.
