A consortium led by Brandon Lutnick’s Cantor Equity Partners is preparing one of the most ambitious treasury-style bets on Bitcoin since MicroStrategy first turned its balance sheet into a proxy for the cryptocurrency market. According to a Financial Times report, the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) backed by brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald has lined up a combined $3 billion in bitcoin contributions from SoftBank, Tether and Bitfinex to seed a new entity called 21 Capital.
Cantor, SoftBank, and Tether Bet Big On Bitcoin
The deal would mark a dramatic entrance for Brandon Lutnick—newly installed as Cantor Fitzgerald chair after his father, Howard Lutnick, joined the Trump administration as commerce secretary—into the centre of an expected post-election revival in US digital-asset investing. Three people briefed on the plan told the FT that 21 Capital will seek to replicate “the success of MicroStrategy, a one-time software company that surged after pivoting to cryptocurrency investing.”
Cantor Equity Partners raised $200 million in its January IPO. That cash, together with the partners’ Bitcoin, would supply the core treasury of 21 Capital. The breakdown cited in the report allocates $1.5 billion in Bitcoin from Tether, $900 million from SoftBank and $600 million from Bitfinex. A further $350 million convertible bond and $200 million private equity placement are being arranged “to buy additional Bitcoin,” the sources said.
Upon completion, the digital-asset contributions would convert into 21 Capital shares at $10 per share, valuing the transferred Bitcoin at $85,000 per coin. The plan is still fluid. The FT cautions that “the deal was likely to be announced in the coming weeks, it could still fail to materialise, and the numbers could change.”
MicroStrategy’s multiyear bitcoin accumulation has produced a $91 billion market capitalization, and its model—issuing equity and low-coupon debt to finance further purchases—has become a playbook for corporate-treasury adoption of digital assets. Lutnick’s proposed vehicle is the first SPAC expressly designed to mimic that template at scale, and it arrives as the Trump administration signals “a more accommodative stance to cryptocurrency trading.”
Cantor Fitzgerald has already benefited from the new policy climate, having advised on Tether’s $775 million investment in conservative video-sharing platform Rumble. The brokerage is also sponsoring two additional Lutnick-led SPACs that remain in search of targets.
The presence of SoftBank—with “$180 billion in assets, $32 billion in cash, and a massive portfolio of companies,” as BTC Inc. chief executive David Bailey observed—gives the proposed vehicle immediate global heft. Bailey told followers on X, “SoftBank has officially entered the Bitcoin market with an initial $900m acquisition… Masayoshi Son!” Steven Lubka, who runs Swan Private Wealth, posted simply: “Cantor, SoftBank, and Tether launching a BTC acquisition vehicle.”
Market observers have been quick to link the consortium’s emergence to Bitcoin’s recent price action. Tuur Demeester, host of the B Reel podcast and a director at the Texas Bitcoin Foundation, wrote that “this announcement could explain why Bitcoin is up 12% in the past week.”
Jeff Park, head of Alpha Strategies at Bitwise, framed the collaboration in geopolitical terms, calling it “the ultimate ‘exorbitant privilege’ joint venture— a move so wild you can’t begin to fathom how it will supercharge the dollar export machine in a positive feedback loop of the existing global carry system.”
At press time, BTC traded at $93,391.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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