In a blog statement Gemini founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss announced they will lay off 25 percent of their staff and pull out of Europe and Australia due to a rough crypto market.
Last Updated: February 06, 2026 at 7:40 PM UTC +1
Published: February 06, 2026 at 7:40 PM UTC +1
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The Crypto exchange, Gemini, announced yesterday that they are shutting down their business in the UK, Europe and Australia and will only focus on the U.S. market. That means about 200 employees are being laid off in Europe, the U.S. and Singapore, and the overall workforce is being cut by 25%.
The charismatic, yet controversial, Winklevoss Twins have been part of the Bitcoin story pretty much from the beginning, at least since crypto entered the bigger frame. Their name might not yet ring a bell, but if you watched “The Social Network” (2010 - David Fincher) about the success story of Facebook, you might remember the two who supposedly came up with the idea first and then turned into arch enemies of Mark Zuckerberg.
Long story short: Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss sued Facebook, didn’t wanna take the money but wanted to get paid in FB-Stock and then started investing in Bitcoin. After that, in 2015, they created the Bitcoin exchange platform and app “Gemini”.
Since then, one can say it has been a success story, which, of course, was always tied to the ups and downs of the cryptocurrencies themselves. Gemini has not been the first exchange platform; the semi-professional Mt. Gox was before that, followed by more professional ones like Kraken and Coinbase. But as the twins made huge investments in times when bitcoin sat at $380, they had a lot of financial playroom.
So, where are we now, and how does Gemini differ from all these other platforms that we have today? If we look at e.g. Coinbase, you can definitely say that there is a lot of overlap, but what stands out with Gemini is their Bitcoin credit card which allows you to do what the brothers call “real time purchases” and with that investments. They argue that if you buy a product, for example, a computer, it can be worth more in the future as it was bought with bitcoin and not the dollar. The dollar will always be worth the same, at least when you look at the overall advantage of Bitcoin, which is that there is only a limited amount and no ‘money printing’ possible. The dollar can, of course, be worth more or less compared to other ‘hard’ currencies.
And that’s how the Winklevoss twins make their money now:
In a competing world of crypto exchange services, which have transaction fees as their main source of revenue (so does Gemini), the credit cards are now their biggest business model. The twins introduced it at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas in May 2025. In addition to that, they are trying to be different from the competitors now by offering their own prediction market (model), which, again, competes with other ones, like “Kalshi”. It was launched in December 2025 after significant quarterly losses in that last period of the year.
You could argue that the company going public (IPO = Initial Public Offering), meaning entering the stock market, was a mistake. In September 2025, the brothers did the big move and went public. With that, people could start buying shares of their crypto exchange company. Since the “Gemini Space Station Inc”, which is the official name on the NASDAQ, went official, the share has lost almost 80% of its value.
It is, of course, very likely that the massive Bitcoin selloff we are experiencing right now is also a major factor for the downsizing Gemini announced on February 5, 2026. But the brothers did not reference that in the official announcement. The layoff is happening because the European and Australian markets are harder to predict and win, which drives their costs up. That’s why they only want to focus on the United States now, or what they call “doubling down on the US.”
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