Gemini Marches to Nasdaq With an IPO Pitch That Says “Ignore the Math, Trust the Trump Bump”

After seeing Coinbase stake its flag in the public markets and Bullish raise an easy $1 billion before blowing up to a $13 billion valuation in its IPO (now down 10% on the year), the Winklevoss twins finally said, “Yeah, let’s do this.” Because why not? If you’re still bitter about Mark Zuckerberg stealing your homework, you might as well console yourself with a Nasdaq ticker symbol… amirite?

So now Gemini (the exchange the twins launched back in 2014) is gunning to raise $317 million by selling 16.7 million shares at $17 to $19 apiece. If you do the math, that would give them a valuation of about $2.2 billion. Not too shabby for a company that’s spent the last two years doing damage control with regulators and trying to prove it’s not the next FTX reboot.

And the timing is almost too perfect. Daddy Trump is back in the White House, chucking pro-crypto policies around like T-shirts at an NBA game. The twins even slid $21 million worth of Bitcoin into a Republican PAC to help grease the wheels of Trump’s “digital assets are the future” agenda. Politics, baby.

(Source: Fox Business)

Of course, Gemini isn’t exactly coming in squeaky clean. Back in 2023, the SEC came after them for selling unregistered securities to retail investors. Gemini spent a hot minute in regulatory purgatory before the whole thing got dropped this year. The CFTC still managed to shake them down for $5 million… pretty much the equivalent of a parking ticket. But it was best case for the twins considering nobody admitted guilt, nobody got cuffed, and the government got its lunch money. Classic “pay the fine and keep the party going” energy.

But dodging lawsuits doesn’t mean you can dodge math… and Gemini’s numbers look like they were written by a drunk raccoon. For instance, in the first half of 2025 they lit $282.5 million on fire while only bringing in $68.6 million. Last year in the same stretch they lost just $41.4 million on higher revenue. I don’t think we need Einstein to explain to us that losing money at a faster rate while also making less of it is never a good sign no matter how much you want to say “we’re scaling.” Obviously, that’s not a business model, that’s a cry for help. And yet… somehow Gemini’s bragging about $18 billion in assets on the platform. 

They’re dangling the usual crypto toys too: staking, a stablecoin, a custody service, and even a credit card that rewards you in XRP (this sounds like a great idea, I’m sure this has never ended in disaster based on history). So yeah, the balance sheet looks like an obituary… but it’s an obituary written on top of a massive pile of customer cash. Which, in crypto land, somehow counts as a business plan.

And in fairness, the Winklevoss did just pull off a huge cleanup job. They closed out a $2.18 billion settlement tied to their Earn program, which froze customer assets for a year and a half. Everyone eventually got their money back (100%) which is unheard of when it comes to the wild, wild west of crypto. That’s a huge credibility boost heading into the IPO, because the last thing Wall Street wants is another exchange vaporizing retail money and ending up in bankruptcy court.

(Source: BBC)

So yeah, the fundamentals are garbage, but this is crypto… vibes matter more than math. And right now the vibes couldn’t be better: Donnie Politics' hugging the industry, the SEC is loosening its triangle choke, and Bullish just proved there’s still IPO appetite (before getting dumped back to the basement). If the Winklevoss bros are ever going to pull this off, it’s clearly right now.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.