# Tyler Winklevoss Co-founder, with his identical twin [[Cameron Winklevoss]], of the Gemini exchange (2014), and one half of the crypto industry's most reliable Republican donor pair. Born 1981; Harvard rowers and 2008 Olympians; the plaintiffs in the Facebook founding dispute with [[Mark Zuckerberg]], settled in 2008 for $65 million in cash and stock that, by the twins' own account, they put into Bitcoin at around $10 in 2012–13 — which made them the first widely reported Bitcoin billionaires in 2017. Tyler is Gemini's chief executive; Cameron its president. ## Gemini Gemini was built as the regulated exchange — a New York trust-company charter in 2015, the "regulation is good" positioning against the offshore venues — and spent the Biden years fighting the regulator it had courted. The 2022 collapse of Genesis froze $900 million belonging to customers of Gemini's Earn lending product; the SEC sued over Earn in January 2023 and dismissed the case in February 2025, one of the string of crypto dismissals under the new Commission. Gemini went public on Nasdaq on **September 12, 2025** (ticker GEMI, $28 a share, $425 million raised, about a $3.3 billion valuation, up 14% on the first day) while losing money — $159 million in 2024, $283 million in the first half of 2025 — with about $21 billion of assets on the platform. The twins' framing at the listing was a $1 million Bitcoin within a decade. ## The politics The twins are the clearest individual case of the [[Crypto-Political Machine]]'s method: money conditioned on policy. They gave $1 million each in Bitcoin to Trump's 2024 campaign (the excess over the legal limit was refunded), funded the [[Crypto Super PACs]] cycle alongside [[Coinbase]] and [[Ripple]], and on **August 20, 2025** gave **$21 million in Bitcoin** (188 BTC) to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC to protect the administration's crypto agenda through the 2026 midterms — a "Bitcoin and Crypto Bill of Rights," a market-structure bill, and an end to "debanking." Tyler's stated worry was Republicans losing Congress; his stated reward was "the American Golden Age." The [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] and [[Cryptocurrency Ecosystem]] pages place the giving beside the dismissals it followed, and [[Debanking]] records the grievance the twins have made central: Operation Choke Point 2.0, the claim that regulators cut crypto off from banking under Biden. ## See Also - [[Cameron Winklevoss]] · [[Mark Zuckerberg]] · [[Coinbase]] · [[Ripple]] · [[Brian Armstrong]] - [[Crypto Super PACs]] · [[Fairshake PAC]] · [[Crypto-Political Machine]] · [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] · [[Cryptocurrency Ecosystem]] · [[Debanking]] · [[SEC]]