Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss

Cameron Howard Winklevoss and Tyler Howard Winklevoss are twin brothers, American rowers and entrepreneurs, founders of the social network ConnectU and the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini.

Early years

The Winklevoss brothers were born on August 21, 1981 in Southampton (New York, USA), but spent their childhood in Greenwich (Connecticut). Their father, a well-known businessman and professor Howard Winklevoss, taught actuarial calculations at the Wharton School of Business and also owned his own company.

Cameron (left-handed) and Tyler (right-handed) have been playing the piano since the age of 6 and surprised adults with their coordinated pair playing of musical instruments and assembling Lego.

At the age of 13, they mastered HTML and started developing websites for business projects. The brothers studied at Greenwich schools and were fond of classics, ancient Greek and Latin. At the age of 15, they started rowing and organized a rowing team at their high school. In 1999, the Winklevosses took part in the Junior World Championships in Plovdiv, forming the double sculls.

In 2000, the brothers entered Harvard University, where they majored in economics and continued to row under the guidance of the famous rower Harry Parker. During their studies, the brothers were members of elite student clubs. In 2004, they graduated with bachelor of arts degrees. In the same year, they won a number of American competitions and traveled to Europe, where they participated in prestigious regattas as part of the eight.

In 2007, the brothers represented the United States at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, where they won gold in the eight and silver in the four. The following year, the Winklevosses made up the American double sculls at the Beijing Olympics. They managed to reach the finals, but finished last with a big gap. In 2009, the brothers began earning a master’s degree in business administration at Oxford University Business School. The following year, they took part in the famous regatta against Cambridge, but lost.

ConnectU

In December 2002, the Winkwalls and their Harvard classmate Divya Narendra decided to create a social network for students from their university and other prestigious educational institutions. Calling it HarvardConnection, they approached a programmer friend, Sanjay Mavinkurve, with a proposal for the technical implementation of the project.

After starting work, in the spring of 2003, Mavinkurwe left the project because he got a job at Google. The partners found another programmer, Victor Gao, but he also stopped working in the fall for personal reasons. In November 2003, the brothers and Narendra hired Mark Zuckerberg and provided him with the code for HarvardConnection.

For the next two months, Zuckerberg avoided contact with his employers, while working with Eduardo Saverin to create his own social network.

On February 6, 2004, brothers Winklevoss and Narendra learned from the university newspaper The Harvard Crimson that Zuckerberg had launched thefacebook.com. They appealed to the university administration with a claim of intellectual property theft, but the administration stated that the case was beyond its competence. University President Lawrence Summers advised them to go to court.

The trio filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, accusing him of stealing the idea and program code. In May of that year, the HarvardConnection website was launched, soon renamed ConnectU. Later, this project began to work closely with Wayne Chang’s i2hub file-sharing network — together they launched several subsidiary projects under the brand The Winklevoss Chang Group.

In February 2008, the lawsuit between ConnectU and Zuckerberg ended in a closed settlement. In December 2009, Wayne Chan accused the Winklevosses of registering patent No. 2 006 021 239 dated March 15, 2005 (aimed at protecting digital copyrights) without listing Chan as its co-owner. He also claimed that his 50 percent stake in The Winklevoss Chang Group entitles him to half of Zuckerberg’s compensation.

In 2010, the law firm that represented ConnectU in the case against Zuckerberg announced the amount of the deal — $ 65 million — and demanded $ 13 million from the hirer for a successful outcome of the case, after which it was fired. In May, it turned out that the $ 65 million was calculated at a significantly lower share price, and ConnectU demanded that Zuckerberg pay more.

In October 2010, the movie The Social Network about the creation of Facebook was released. The two brothers were played by actor Ernie Hammer: the filmmakers could not find twins who looked like the Winklevosses.

In 2010, after receiving their MBAs from Oxford University, the brothers founded Winklevoss Capital to engage in venture capital investments. The Winklevosses wanted to invest in large technology companies and join the ranks of Silicon Valley investors. However, they soon realized that everyone was avoiding them. Startup founders simply refused to take their money, fearing reprisals from Facebook.

The twin brothers' first encounter with cryptocurrencies is described in the book Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, which was published in 2019.

Mezrich explained how the Winklevosses, while vacationing in Ibiza in June 2012, met early bitcoin buyers who also happened to be outsiders to the world of traditional technology. The athlete brothers liked the idea that money was the ultimate social network. In addition, they found the lack of central bank control over bitcoin and the mathematical certainty of this cryptocurrency attractive.

In May 2013, the twins invested $ 1.5 million in BitInstant, a crypto exchange that allowed them to exchange dollars for bitcoins in a few minutes for a small commission. The business grew rapidly — at the time, BitInstant accounted for about 30% of all bitcoin purchases.

Unfortunately, some of these transactions were related to money laundering by drug traffickers who sold their goods on the Silk Road website in the anonymous Tor network. By the end of 2013, BitInstant ceased to exist. The founder and CEO of the exchange, computer genius Charlie Shrem, with whom the Winklevoss brothers collaborated, was arrested and spent a year in federal prison for illegal activities.

Gemini

Faced with a new blow of fate, the Winklevosses realized that if they were going to succeed in the new market, they needed to go it alone and bring order to a chaotic and unregulated industry.

In 2014, the brothers launched their own cryptocurrency exchange called Gemini. At first, only bitcoins could be bought and sold on Gemini, but now 33 cryptocurrencies are traded on the exchange. Among them is Ethereum, which is distinguished by its own programming language that allows creating decentralized online services.

Gemini also offers the Zcash cryptocurrency, which is based on bitcoin but provides a higher degree of privacy. Another available cryptocurrency is called MANA. It is used in the virtual reality world of Decentraland. The twins are also developing their own cryptocurrency Gemini Dollar, which is based on the Ethereum blockchain. The price of this cryptocurrency is pegged to the value of the US dollar, and therefore less subject to volatility.

In October 2015, Gemini was one of the first crypto exchanges working with bitcoin (and now there are more than 300 of them) to receive the status of a trust bank from the New York State Department of Financial Services. Now they were subject to the same rules and requirements as banks like State Street and Northern Trust, and could accept deposits in all 50 US states.

And while Gemini’s annual trading volume ($ 29 billion in 2021) is significantly lower than that of giants like Binance or Coinbase, the twins' company is ahead of them in industry trust ratings, which is a significant asset in a market where exchange operations can often be hacked and inflated trading volumes are not uncommon. Given the current atmosphere of staggering valuations, as in the case of Coinbase, which was valued at $ 68 billion, Gemini could fetch $ 5 billion if the company were to seek outside investment.

In their advertising campaigns, the Winklevosses constantly emphasize that Gemini is a «regulated» cryptocurrency exchange, as the brothers prepare to create new sources of income. To do so, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must finally approve their cryptocurrency ETFs, which already exist in Canada and other continents. Since 2013, the brothers have been unsuccessfully applying to the SEC to create their own bitcoin ETF. So far, they have been denied twice, the last time in 2018. At that time, the SEC explained the rejection by the immaturity of the entire industry.

Currently, the SEC is considering six applications for cryptocurrency ETFs from Wisdom Tree, Van Eck, Fidelity, First Trust, and Anthony Scaramucci’s brainchild Skybridge Financial. Gemini Exchange, which currently offers credit cards with bitcoin cashback and savings accounts with 7% annual interest on cryptocurrency deposits, has also filed an application with the SEC to open an alternative platform for trading stocks and other securities on the blockchain.

Other information

It is worth noting that Cameron and Tyler Winkwoss became the first publicly known bitcoin billionaires. According to the brothers, they «live on bitcoin».

The brothers have also launched their own financial bitcoin index, Winkdex, designed to track the BTC exchange rate based on data from the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

Through their holding Gemini Space Station, which owns the Gemini and Nifty Gateway cryptocurrency exchanges, as well as through investments of their family firm Winklevoss Capital, the brothers have invested in at least 25 startups dealing with digital assets (BlockFi, Messari, TaxBit, etc.).

According to the Forbes Real Time Billionaire Index, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were worth $ 3.7 billion each in June this year. They are ranked 728th in the Forbes ranking.