Gemini (company)

Gemini Trust Company, LLC (Gemini) is a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian that allows customers to buy, sell, and store digital assets. It is a New York trust company that is regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) and was founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

In June 2016, Gemini became the world's first licensed ether exchange. In May 2018, it was announced that Gemini had become the world’s first licensed Zcash exchange. Currently, it operates in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Primary competitors include Coinbase, Binance, Bitstamp, and Kraken. All users are able to trade cryptocurrency and fiat currency on an open market. Users are able to transfer USD to and from their bank accounts.

Gemini began in order to facilitate the purchase and storage of Bitcoin through a complex system of private keys and password protected environments. Only a small percentage of the total bitcoin on the exchange is held online to minimize the risk of loss from hacking.

Gemini was the first exchange to launch bitcoin futures contracts in December 2017. The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) uses Gemini "as the basis for the daily settlement for the bitcoin futures".

History
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss announced Gemini in June 2013 and the company went live on October 25, 2015. Gemini began adding to the financial services it offers thereafter, some of which include FIX and API support. On May 5, 2016 Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York State announced the approval of Gemini as the first licensed Ethereum exchange based in the United States. Additionally, in 2016, Gemini announced it would allow users to withdraw Ethereum Classic (ETC) from the exchange, following a hard fork in Ethereum's code.

In October 2017, Gemini announced that it was allowing registered users to withdraw Bitcoin Cash from the exchange provided they had a balance available on the exchange prior to the Bitcoin hard fork in August 2017.

In December 2017, the Chicago Board Options Exchange began to use Gemini to settle its Bitcoin futures contracts. Cboe partnered with Gemini so as to use Gemini's dollar denominated auction price for these contracts.

In March 2018, Gemini added a number of partnerships and products to its portfolio and network. It announced a partnership with Caspian, the full-stack cryptocurrency trading and risk management platform for institutional and complex investors.

In April 2018, Gemini began offering "Block Trading". Block Trading enables Gemini users to buy and sell large quantities of digital assets outside of Gemini's continuous order books, creating an additional liquidity mechanism when trading in greater size. Also in April, Gemini began to utilize NASDAQ's SMARTS technology to monitor trades and combat fraudulent activity and price manipulation on its exchange.

On May 14, 2018, the New York Department of Financial Services announced it had approved Gemini to offer Zcash (ZEC) on their platform, becoming the first licensed exchange to offer trading and custody services for it.

On September 10, 2018, Gemini had received regulatory approval for a new product, the Gemini dollar (GUSD) from the NYDFS and would launch trading of the coin that same day. Gemini described the product as a stablecoin which maintains a 1-to-1 peg with the American dollar.

On October 3, 2018 it was announced that Gemini had obtained digital asset insurance covering tokens and coins held on its exchange. The insurance had been brokered by Aon, a London based public risk consulting company, and underwritten by a consortium of global underwriters.

In May 2020, a partnership was announced with Samsung whereby Samsung smartphone users could link their Samsung Blockchain Wallets to their Gemini accounts to view balances and transfer crypto.

In November 2021 Gemini raised $400 million investment that values the New York parent company, Gemini Space Station, LLC, at $7.1 billion.

NFTs
In November 2019, the Gemini Trust Co. bought Nifty Gateway for an undisclosed sum. Nifty Gateway is a marketplace for NFTs. The goal of the NFT marketplace is to be a custodian for various assets, including property deeds, passports, commodities, collectibles, videogame characters, movies, music and event tickets.

Service disruptions
The site's primary challenge has been remaining online at times of excessively high volumes, a relatively common occurrence for any website receiving an unusual amount of traffic. On November 28, 2017, for example, both Gemini and Coinbase crashed for several hours. Gemini was showing a "504 gateway time-out" message, and the status page showed "Systems are currently experiencing degraded performance." Subsequently, the Gemini Blog offered this comment. "This is not the first scaling challenge we’ve encountered, and it won’t be the last. We’re continuing to improve our performance and infrastructure monitoring so we can anticipate potential problems more quickly in the future."