Who are the Winklevoss twins? The founders of Gemini

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are American identical twins who founded Gemini in 2014, a New York-based platform for trading and custody of crypto assets that has been listed on Nasdaq since September 2025. Tyler is its chief executive and Cameron its president. Before turning to bitcoin they studied economics at Harvard, rowed for the United States at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and became known for their lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of Facebook.

Their path in bitcoin is that of two investors who sought legitimacy for the asset within the regulated financial system: first with an exchange-traded fund the SEC rejected twice, then with a platform that obtained a trust company charter from the New York regulator before opening. That approach gave them access to institutional clients and to the stock market. It also left them exposed to regulators when Earn, a programme that depended on an outside company, froze its customers' funds in 2022.

Harvard, rowing and the Facebook lawsuit

Both graduated in economics from Harvard University in 2004 and earned an MBA at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford in 2010, according to Gemini's IPO prospectus. Between the two degrees they rowed together: they represented the United States in the men's pair at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and finished sixth.

At Harvard, together with their classmate Divya Narendra, they started a university social network that eventually became ConnectU. They claimed Mark Zuckerberg had used their idea to create Facebook, which the company always denied, and in 2008 they reached a settlement valued at 65 million dollars in cash and Facebook shares. They later tried to undo it, arguing that Facebook had concealed information about the value of its shares. On 11 April 2011, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their appeal. "At some point, litigation must come to an end," wrote Judge Alex Kozinski, according to the Reuters report carried by NBC News.

From bitcoin investors to Gemini

The twins began buying bitcoin in the summer of 2012, when a coin was worth single-digit dollars, and that year they co-founded Winklevoss Capital, their investment firm. In April 2013 they told The New York Times they held about 11 million dollars in bitcoin, close to 1% of the coins then in circulation, according to the article republished by CNBC. According to Forbes, they paid for those purchases with part of the money from the Facebook settlement.

In mid-2013 they asked the SEC to approve an exchange-traded fund tracking the price of bitcoin, the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust. The SEC rejected it on 10 March 2017 because bitcoin markets were unregulated and the exchange could not reach the surveillance arrangements needed to prevent fraud and manipulation, according to its order, and it rejected a revised version again in July 2018, according to ETF.com.

Gemini opened on 5 October 2015, after the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) granted it a limited purpose trust company charter, according to the company's announcement. The twins chose that structure, governed by the state's banking law, over the BitLicense New York required of crypto businesses, arguing that they wanted a platform both retail investors and Wall Street could trust.

How Gemini works: regulated custody and a stablecoin

A limited purpose trust company cannot lend like a bank, but it can hold third-party assets under the supervision of the state regulator, which reviews its capital, anti-money laundering controls and cybersecurity. Gemini Trust holds customer assets using custody solutions in offline wallets, and according to its prospectus it holds every user's assets in full on the platform. The model is that of a custodial wallet: customers do not manage their keys and depend on the company's controls.

On that basis, the NYDFS authorised Gemini on 10 September 2018 to issue the Gemini dollar (GUSD), a dollar-pegged stablecoin, on condition that it be exchangeable for dollars at all times, according to the regulator's announcement. GUSD is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum: Gemini issues one unit for every dollar it receives and destroys it when the holder redeems it, so the supply in circulation should match the reserves.

The company's ownership structure matters as well. Gemini has two classes of shares: Class A shares, which trade on the exchange, carry one vote each, while Class B shares, all held by the twins and their entities, carry ten. After the listing, the Winklevoss twins retained 94.7% of the voting power, according to the prospectus, which makes Gemini a controlled company under Nasdaq rules.

Gemini Earn and the regulators

Earn was the episode that most compromised that regulated strategy. Between February 2021 and November 2022, Gemini offered customers the option of lending their crypto assets to Genesis, an outside company, in exchange for interest. When Genesis halted redemptions after the FTX crisis, around 232,000 users lost access to roughly 1.05 billion dollars in assets, according to the prospectus. In January 2023, the SEC sued Genesis and Gemini for offering Earn as an unregistered security.

On 28 February 2024, Gemini agreed to pay a 37 million dollar fine to the NYDFS and contribute 40 million to the Genesis bankruptcy. Earn customers recovered their crypto assets in kind between May and June 2024, and on 23 January 2026 the SEC filed to dismiss its lawsuit with prejudice, citing that full recovery, according to The Block.

The other front was the CFTC, which sued Gemini in June 2022 over allegedly misleading statements it made in 2017 about the risk of manipulation of a bitcoin futures contract. Gemini paid 5 million dollars to settle the case in January 2025. In May 2026, the CFTC itself joined the motion to vacate that settlement: it acknowledged that the complaint should not have been filed, that it relied on a whistleblower who lacked credibility and that its staff had improperly used their authority to force a settlement, according to The Block. The reversal drew criticism: Brian Quintenz, a former nominee to chair the CFTC, had accused Tyler Winklevoss in 2025 of lobbying Donald Trump against his nomination because he refused to take sides in that case.

The Winklevoss twins today

Gemini went public on 12 September 2025 at 28 dollars a share and raised 425 million dollars, according to its pricing announcement. The year ended with a net loss of 582.8 million dollars, and on 19 March 2026 the stock closed at 6.01 dollars, according to The Block. In February 2026, Gemini announced its exit from the United Kingdom, the European Union and Australia and a cut of about a quarter of its staff to focus on the United States and Singapore and on its prediction market, approved by the CFTC in December 2025, according to The Block. In March a group of investors filed a class action against the company and the twins over the IPO disclosures; its allegations have not been resolved.

Outside Gemini, the twins are active donors in US politics. On 20 August 2025 they donated 188 bitcoins, about 21 million dollars at the time, to the Digital Freedom Fund, a political action committee backing Trump's crypto agenda, according to The Block. They also back privacy projects: in January 2026 they donated 3,221 ZEC, about 1.16 million dollars, to Shielded Labs to fund independent Zcash development, and in October 2026 their asset manager registered a spot Zcash exchange-traded fund with the SEC under the proposed ticker WINK, according to The Block.

What is the Winklevoss twins' net worth?

Forbes estimates each twin's net worth at 2.8 billion dollars, about 5.6 billion between them, according to its real-time billionaire profiles of Cameron and Tyler checked on 10 November 2026. Forbes attributes most of it to bitcoin: in the latest update to their profile, dated 10 March 2026, it estimates the twins still hold about 70,000 bitcoin plus other digital assets. Their wealth also includes their Class B shares in Gemini and the investments of Winklevoss Capital, their investment firm.

It is an estimate that changes daily with the price of bitcoin and of Gemini's stock, and Forbes does not publish the breakdown of its calculation. Their bitcoin holdings cannot be verified in full: blockchain analytics firms can attribute to them only the addresses they have identified, such as the 130 million dollars in bitcoin that Arkham attributed to them in a transfer to Gemini in March 2026, according to The Block.

The Winklevoss twins' contribution: bitcoin inside regulation

The Winklevoss twins' contribution lies in bringing bitcoin into legal structures the financial system already recognised. They applied for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund in mid-2013, opened their platform as a trust company supervised by New York in 2015 and obtained approval from the same regulator in 2018 for a stablecoin redeemable for dollars. Each step showed that a crypto company could operate under a banking supervisor's custody and capital rules.

Earn marked the limit. The supervision of Gemini Trust did not prevent its customers' assets from being lent to Genesis, a company outside that perimeter, and the NYDFS fined Gemini for failing to properly oversee that third party. There is also a governance tension: with 94.7% of the votes, Gemini's shareholders have little influence over its decisions, and the twins' political ties to the administration under which the CFTC reversed its case raise questions about the regulator's independence, even though the CFTC itself now describes that case as weak.