The demise of the Winklevoss twins and Bitcoin reaches $39,500

Bitcoin rose to $39,500 overnight, its highest price of the year, and looks poised to make the jump to $40k. How high will the largest digital coin end in 2023? In any case, two people will cheer a little bit less than all others.

The Winklevoss twins saw riches thanks to a lawsuit against Facebook and an early investment in Bitcoin. But because they wanted to outsmart the competition, they are now being sued themselves. This is their story.

Social Network

With the money they received from their lawsuit settlement against Mark Zuckerberg twenty years ago, the Winklevoss twins started several companies. One of them became a real giant of the crypto world, the crypto platform Gemini. Everything was going well until it all went wrong in 2022 for the former stars of ‘The Social Network.’

In the same month that saw FTX go bust, November 2022, other crypto companies in America also ran into trouble. Genesis, another major crypto company, had lost billions of dollars due to the demise of FTT, Luna and Terra. As a result, Gemini, the company founded by the Winklevoss twins, couldn’t let thousands of customers withdraw their coins anymore. Genesis went under, Gemini barely survived.

Meanwhile, Gemini’s former clients have sued the twins. As a result, a lawsuit was recently opened in New York. The twins are being sued for a billion dollars.

Facebook

In 2004, the Winklevoss brothers filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg. They claimed that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them. The whole ordeal became world famous through ‘The Social Network’ movie.

The twins finally received $65 million from Zuckerberg in 2008 and started several companies with it. Most were not really successful until they met a man in Ibiza who told them about Bitcoin.

The brothers created a company that, thanks to their father’s strong connections to Wall Street, gained a good reputation for trading Bitcoin. Gemini was born.

Mt Gox

After Mt Gox was hacked and many lost their Bitcoin investments, there was a clear need for reliable Bitcoin companies. Gemini grew and grew and by 2019 it controlled a large part of the US crypto world.

Funnily enough, Gemini almost went into business with Facebook, which wanted to set up its own stablecoin (called Libra). However, rumor has it that Zuckerberg ultimately declined to do business with the twins. In any case, Libra never took off. The global banks considered a social network with a reach of 2 billion potential customers too great a threat and blocked Libra via regulators.

Gemini continued alone and grew steadily. 2020 brought even more riches for the brothers as Bitcoin began another bull run.

However, because Binance, FTX and Coinbase all grew faster than them, the brothers took an unprecedented risk at the end of 2021. They partnered with Genesis, a crypto lending company founded by Barry Silbert.

The Winklevoss twins promised their customers an ‘earn’ formula where they could start a kind of crypto savings account that promised them an interest of 8% per year. It became a great success. Everything went well until Genesis, which had many investments in the digital coins FTT, Luna and Terra, went under in November 2022 and the Winklevoss twins could no longer pay back some of their customers (about 300,000);

They have largely missed the Bitcoin bull run of 2023 because they are now involved in several lawsuits. Thanks to the family’s legal team, this was mostly kept out of the media and also because Sam Bankman-Fried was a bigger name, the Winklevoss case did not receive too much press attention. But now they are being sued for a billion dollars by authorities in New York and it seems like the end is near for the brothers.

Coinbase’s market share in the United States is about 40 times larger than Gemini and the brothers appear to have lost the battle for the American crypto market.

We wonder what Zuckerberg thinks about it all, of course.