What it is
Gemini is a crypto exchange and custodian founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The regulated entity is Gemini Trust Company, LLC, licensed and supervised by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Gemini Space Station, Inc. priced an initial public offering of 15,178,572 Class A shares at $28 on 11 September 2025 and began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market the following day under the ticker GEMI.
For a Bitcoin reader the relevant part is plain: Gemini runs a spot exchange and holds customer crypto assets, bitcoin included, in custody. This is an operating business, not a collapsed one, and the section below is about one product it ran, not about the company failing.
Gemini Earn
Between February 2021 and November 2022 Gemini offered Gemini Earn. Customers lent crypto assets to Genesis Global Capital, with Gemini acting as agent and taking a fee from the interest. Genesis, not Gemini, held and deployed the assets. When Genesis stopped withdrawals in November 2022, about 340,000 Earn investors were locked out of roughly $900 million.
On 12 January 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Genesis and Gemini in the Southern District of New York for the unregistered offer and sale of securities through Earn, under Sections 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act of 1933.
On 28 February 2024 Gemini entered a consent order with the New York State Department of Financial Services. Gemini committed to returning at least $1.1 billion to Earn customers through the Genesis bankruptcy, to contributing $40 million to that bankruptcy for their benefit, and to paying a $37 million fine to the Department for what the Superintendent described as failures that threatened the safety and soundness of the company.
On 14 June 2024 the New York Attorney General announced a settlement returning approximately $50 million of digital assets to more than 230,000 Earn investors and banning Gemini from running a crypto lending programme in New York. It resolved the Attorney General's claims against Gemini; the office's case against other defendants continued.
On 23 January 2026 the SEC filed a joint stipulation dismissing its action against Gemini with prejudice, citing the 100 per cent in-kind return of Earn investors' crypto assets and the state settlements. No court found Gemini liable, and the federal case ended without one. Listing here is not endorsement.