Jack Mallers Slams Visa and Mastercard Fees, Pitches Bitcoin as Better Money Railing

Jack Mallers used the Bitcoin 2026 Conference to take a sledgehammer to the legacy payments stack, arguing that Visa and Mastercard have spent years squeezing merchants with hefty fees while dressing up those costs as consumer “rewards.”

• Merchant fees: Mallers says card networks take 3% to 5% per transaction
• Hidden cost: cashback, miles, and perks are funded by merchant losses
• Bitcoin pitch: faster, cheaper value transfer without centralized gatekeepers
• Big exposure: Twenty One Capital holds 43,514 BTC, worth about $3.3 billion
• Gold comparison: Bitcoin, he says, stores value and moves it

The Twenty One Capital CEO did not exactly whisper his complaints into the wind. In remarks that landed squarely in Bitcoin’s long-running critique of traditional finance, Mallers said card networks are “holding merchants hostage and abusing customers.” His argument is straightforward: businesses eat the fees, consumers enjoy the shiny perks, and the middlemen collect the toll.

That complaint is not new, but it keeps resonating because it describes a real pain point. Merchants have been grumbling about card processing fees for years, and for good reason. When a network skim of 3% to 5% lands on every transaction, that may sound small in the abstract. In practice, it is brutal. If a customer spends $100, the merchant may only keep $95 to $97 after fees. Scale that across thousands of sales and the math gets ugly fast, especially for restaurants, retailers, and online businesses operating on thin margins.

The “free” cashback, airline miles, and airport lounge access sold to consumers are rarely free at all. Someone pays for them, and that someone is usually the merchant. Those costs get folded into the broader economy like a tax nobody voted for, except this one comes with polished branding and a points app.

Mallers framed Bitcoin as the cleaner alternative. In his view, Bitcoin can move money across the world quickly and at far lower cost than the existing card infrastructure allows. That is a core Bitcoin thesis: money should move without begging centralized institutions for permission, and it should not require a toll booth at every turn.

That “permissioned rails” idea matters. Visa and Mastercard operate through centralized systems that can approve, block, reverse, or flag transactions according to their own rules and the rules of the institutions behind them. Bitcoin works differently. Its network is decentralized, so no single company gets to sit in the middle and collect rent just for letting value travel from point A to point B.

Of course, there is a catch, and pretending otherwise would be nonsense. Bitcoin payments are not yet a clean drop-in replacement for every card swipe in every corner store. Volatility still scares merchants. Self-custody can feel like a chore for people used to tapping plastic and forgetting about it. Network congestion can affect fees and confirmation times, and while tools like the Lightning Network can improve speed and cost for small payments, adoption is still uneven. The dream is real; the plumbing is still getting sorted.

Mallers also drew a sharp contrast between Bitcoin and gold. Gold, he said, is a store of value. Bitcoin does that too, but it also moves value across the world in a way gold never could without trucks, vaults, security teams, and a whole lot of dumb logistical overhead.

“Gold stores value. Bitcoin stores value and moves it.”

That line gets to the heart of why Bitcoin keeps attracting both builders and believers. Gold has been treated as money for centuries, but it is not exactly built for modern commerce. You can hoard it, but you cannot easily send a sliver of it across the planet in seconds. Bitcoin is designed to be hard money that also works as usable money. Store of value and medium of exchange, not one or the other.

Mallers also leaned into one of Bitcoin’s most powerful economic features: its fixed supply. Only 21 million BTC will ever exist. That scarcity is the point. It is what separates Bitcoin from fiat currencies, which can be expanded at will by central banks and watered down over time. The result, according to Mallers, is a simple behavioral truth:

“People spend the money they think will lose value and hold onto the money they think will gain it.”

That is not just a clever line. It gets at why monetary design matters. If people expect their money to lose purchasing power, they rush to spend it, save badly, or chase speculative assets just to keep up. If they expect it to hold or increase in value, they are more likely to save, plan, and build. Bad money encourages bad behavior. Good money gives people a better shot at thinking long term instead of living in financial panic mode.

Twenty One Capital’s own balance sheet gives Mallers’ comments serious weight. The company holds 43,514 Bitcoin, worth roughly $3.3 billion. That is not a guy tossing slogans from the sidelines. He is deeply exposed to Bitcoin’s success. Naturally, that makes the pitch less than neutral. A corporate executive sitting on a mountain of BTC is going to be enthusiastic about a future where Bitcoin matters more and the card cartel matters less.

That said, bias does not automatically make him wrong. Far from it. The complaint about merchant fees predates Bitcoin by years. Businesses have long hated the economics of card payments, even if consumers have been trained to love the rewards. Visa and Mastercard built a monster of convenience, and merchants have been subsidizing the party for a long time.

Bitcoin maximalists will hear Mallers and nod hard. The case is simple: payment rails should be open, cheap, and resistant to rent extraction by centralized gatekeepers. That vision fits neatly with financial decentralization, privacy, and the broader idea that money should not be controlled by a handful of institutions with oversized leverage over commerce.

Still, the devil’s-advocate side deserves more than a token shrug. Card networks are not just expensive toll collectors. They also provide broad consumer trust, chargeback protection, fraud tooling, and a user experience that nearly everyone already understands. A chargeback, for readers who have never had to deal with one, is when a customer disputes a card charge and the merchant can be forced to refund it, often with extra fees attached. Merchants hate that when it is abused, but consumers also value the protection. Bitcoin does not offer that same safety net by default.

That is one reason card networks remain sticky. People like points. People like cashback. People like being able to reverse bad charges when a merchant screws up. And yes, consumers also like the illusion that all of that is free. It is not free. It is simply hidden inside a system that is deeply normalized.

Bitcoin payments, by contrast, still ask more of the user. They ask people to understand wallets, private keys, transaction finality, and sometimes tax treatment. They ask merchants to think differently about settlement and treasury management. They ask both sides to accept volatility in a way the card system does not. That is a tall order, especially when most people are happy to keep swiping and collecting points like it is a national hobby.

But the bigger strategic picture is hard to ignore. Bitcoin is increasingly being pitched not only as digital gold, but as a genuine monetary network for settlement and commerce. That is the part that threatens the old order. Gold stores value. Bitcoin stores value and can move it. If more businesses adopt BTC payments, especially through better infrastructure and cleaner user experience, the pressure on card networks could slowly build from the edges inward.

Mallers wants BTC payments to become a real option for every entrepreneur and consumer in the country. That goal is ambitious, but it is not crazy. The payments industry is built on habits, and habits can change when a better alternative becomes practical enough to use. The hard part is not making the philosophical case. Bitcoin already won that argument in a lot of circles. The hard part is making the day-to-day experience so smooth that businesses can say, without lying to themselves, “Yeah, this actually works.”

There are also competing paths to that same destination. Stablecoins are chasing payment use cases too, and they have their own advantages in speed and familiarity for people who want blockchain rails without Bitcoin’s volatility. That does not kill Bitcoin’s role, but it does remind everyone that merchant adoption will not be a one-horse race. BTC may be the hardest money, but payments are a messy battlefield and the smartest tools often win by niche first, not by conquering the planet on day one.

The real tension sits right there: the legacy payments system is expensive, centralized, and deeply entrenched, while Bitcoin offers a cleaner monetary alternative with lower-cost global transfer and a harder form of money. Both things can be true at once. The old system has glaring flaws. Bitcoin still has friction to overcome before it can replace everyday card payments at scale. No magic wand, no fairy dust, no corporate kumbaya.

For now, Mallers is making a familiar Bitcoin case, but with a massive corporate treasury behind the microphone. And if traditional finance wants to keep pretending merchant fees are just a harmless little rounding error, merchants have the receipts.

• What is Jack Mallers arguing?
  He says Bitcoin can free merchants and consumers from high fees, control, and hidden costs tied to card networks.
• Why does he criticize Visa and Mastercard?
  Because merchants often pay 3% to 5% per transaction, while consumer rewards are effectively funded by those merchant losses.
• How does Bitcoin compare to gold in his view?
  Gold stores value, but Bitcoin stores value and moves it quickly and cheaply.
• Why don’t most people spend Bitcoin on daily purchases?
  Mallers says people tend to spend money they expect to lose value and hold money they expect to gain value.
• Why does Twenty One Capital matter here?
  Its 43,514 BTC treasury shows Mallers is backing up the rhetoric with a massive Bitcoin position.
• Can Bitcoin replace Visa and Mastercard today?
  Not at full scale yet. The case is strong, but volatility, user experience, and merchant integration still create real friction.