Winklevoss Twins Eat, Sleep, Breathe Bitcoin

The twin Harvard graduates of Facebook fame Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss just took the stage at Disrupt NY to update everyone on their recent bitcoin projects. As a reminder, the twins have recently launched an exchange traded fund (ETF) under the symbol ‘COIN’ so that old-school traders can trade bitcoins on the NASDAQ OMX. The two brothers also recently announced a new bitcoin exchange called Gemini. They want to build a fully regulated and fully compliant U. S.-based exchange.
‘A lot of people don’t want to deal with the effort needed to secure your bitcoins,’ Cameron Winklevoss said. ‘That’s why we started to build Gemini, which is a U. S.-based exchange with compliance – it’s NASDAQ, E-Trade and BTC built into one.’
According to Tyler, there is a long-standing dilemma when it comes to bitcoin exchanges – it’s either too hard or not secure enough. Buying and storing bitcoins yourself in a cold storage wallet with private and public keys is a real burden. But startups that make it easy aren’t dealing with financial authorities enough and don’t provide enough guarantees to their customers.

This post was published at Tech Crunch on May 6, 2015.