A bitcoin treasury company has filed a conference keynote about mining economics with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Companies file what they intend investors to read.
Twenty One Capital’s chief executive used the 13-minute talk to argue that Bitcoin mining is at its most attractive entry point in years and that public miners are abandoning the industry. He founded one of the largest mining companies in the world before taking the job six weeks ago.
Twenty One Capital filed the transcript of Rapha Zagury’s Bitcoin Asia 2026 keynote as Exhibit 99.1 to an SEC filing, covering remarks delivered at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on August 28.
The Hashrate Claim
Zagury told the audience that Bitcoin is living through the first bear market in hashrate in its history. He said the network’s hash rate reached close to 1.3 zettahashes late last year and has been gradually coming down since, describing it as the longest period the network has seen between an all-time high and a recovery.
He drew a direct contrast with 2021, when China banned mining and the hash rate collapsed quickly and then recovered as machines were redeployed to other jurisdictions. What is happening now, he said, looks very different.
The claim is broadly supported by third-party data. CoinWarz recorded a peak above 1.38 ZH/s in late September 2025, and the Hashrate Index put the October 19 peak at 1,162 EH/s. By mid-August 2026, the network was roughly 17% below its all-time high, with trackers showing a range near 850 to 920 EH/s.
Difficulty Has Followed
Mining difficulty has moved in the same direction, posting year-over-year declines for only the second time in the network’s history. One analysis put difficulty as much as 19.9% below its own record in early August, a steeper fall than hashrate itself.
Difficulty peaked at about 155 trillion in late October 2025. By March 2026 it had fallen 7.76% in a single adjustment to 133.79 trillion, the second-largest single decline in almost a year, with seven of the preceding ten adjustments negative.
Zagury described the difficulty adjustment as what makes Bitcoin unique among commodities. Unlike oil or gold, where higher prices draw more production and eventually more supply, a block is still found roughly every ten minutes regardless of how much hashing power competes for it.
Nobody Is Staying the Course, He Says
The keynote’s sharpest line came near the end. Zagury said that among public mining companies, there really is not anybody staying the course to mine Bitcoin at scale, and that pretty much everybody is leaving the industry right now.
Available data partly supports him. Public miners have been redirecting power and capital toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Hut 8’s contracted AI infrastructure portfolio has reached $26.6 billion, and CoinShares has projected that AI and HPC work could supply 70% of listed miners’ revenue by the end of 2026.
CoinShares also projected that hashrate could return toward 1.8 zettahashes per second by the end of 2026 if Bitcoin recovered toward $100,000, which suggests the current retreat is priced to conditions rather than structural. Hashprice has spent 2026 at levels thinner than any period since before 2016.
The Argument for Mining Over Bitcoin
Zagury said Twenty One’s first question on any opportunity is how it performs against Bitcoin, which he described as the company’s benchmark. If an opportunity cannot beat Bitcoin, he said, investors should buy an ETF instead, because that is less risky than holding an operating business.
Asked the recurring question of whether a dollar is better spent on mining or on bitcoin itself, he said that with only one dollar, buy Bitcoin first. At a larger scale and within a diversified allocation, he said mining can make sense, and the better risk-adjusted position is to hold some of both.
His stated mechanism is that mining outperforms Bitcoin when the price rises faster than the network hashrate. These are the assessments of an executive whose company may allocate capital to the sector and are reported here as his position rather than as analysis.
Energy and the Second Accusation
Roughly half the keynote addressed the argument that mining wastes energy. Zagury recounted working on a project in Manicoré, in the Brazilian Amazon, in 2002, describing a community with abundant food but no electricity, where medicine spoiled for lack of refrigeration.
He argued energy consumption correlates with development rather than representing waste and that mining is the most flexible load ever invented—machines can be switched off instantly, unlike a steel mill that may take months to restart. He said conversations with governments and energy companies increasingly focus on idle load and grid stabilization.
Zagury became chief executive on July 20, 2026, after Jack Mallers departed and Tether’s three-way merger plan collapsed. The Crypto Times reported at the time that he intended to shift the company away from pure bitcoin accumulation toward generating cash flow and disciplined capital allocation. Twenty One is majority-owned by Tether and Bitfinex with a minority SoftBank stake and listed on the NYSE in December 2025.
