Buoyed to fame by their legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have spent years trying to prove their own business bona fides, culminating in Friday’s planned IPO of their crypto exchange, Gemini. But another public feud—this time with Brian Quintenz, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission—has created a cloud of controversy around their public market debut.
The Winklevoss twins have long been top figures in the crypto industry, first as vocal cheerleaders for Bitcoin, then as the founders of Gemini, the exchange they founded in 2014. Though Gemini has lagged behind its competitors like Coinbase, the Winklevoss twins have ridden crypto’s latest boom—and the public market success of other companies such as Circle and Bullish—to their own IPO, which is targeting a valuation over $3 billion. With trading set to begin on Friday, however, the Winklevoss twins’ entanglement with Quintenz’s nomination could serve as a distraction.
The CFTC fight
As the crypto industry rallied behind Trump during the last presidential campaign cycle, the Winklevoss twins emerged as two of his most ardent supporters. After Trump’s victory, they became frequent guests at crypto events, including a digital asset summit held at the White House in March.
In July, they used their new D.C. power to lobby against Quintenz, a former CFTC commissioner and head of policy at the top venture firm a16z crypto, who the Trump administration had tapped to lead the small but influential regulatory agency.
In an interview with the crypto publication CoinDesk, the Winklevoss twins raised ethical concerns about Quintenz’s board member role with the prediction market, Kalshi, which falls under the remit of the CFTC, as well as his views on policing the DeFi, or decentralized finance, sector. Quintenz’s Senate nomination, which many onlookers believed to be a shoo-in, has been stuck in limbo.
While Quintenz has stayed silent on the nomination fight, he finally fired back on Wednesday, the week of Gemini’s planned IPO. In a post on the social media platform X, he shared Signal messages between himself and the Winklevoss twins from June, where they appear to demand Quintenz’s view on their own complaint against the CFTC’s enforcement attorneys. (The Winklevoss twins have accused the agency of “lawfare trophy hunting” over a lawsuit that Gemini settled for making false or misleading statements regarding Bitcoin products.)
In his post, Quintenz wrote that the texts “make it clear” what the Winklevoss twins “were after from me and what I refused to promise.”
A spokesperson for Gemini declined to comment.
Gemini’s IPO is still set for this week, though the crypto exchange reported net losses of nearly $300 million in the first half of this year. Still, with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum surging in price, and the Winklevoss twins’ close ties to the Trump administration, they hope to cement their roles as industry leaders.
