UPDATED 02:36 EST / OCTOBER 08 2015

NEWS

Winklevoss twins talk about their new Gemini Bitcoin exchange in a Reddit AMA

Twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have celebrated the launch of their new Bitcoin exchange Gemini Trust Company LLC. this week by taking to Reddit to do an AMA (ask me anything).

Despite the way they were perhaps portrayed in the movie The Social Network and perceptions around them since, one thing that stood out from the AMA interaction is just how well spoken and articulate both of the twins are; most AMA’s occur when celebrities or business people are trying to promote something and that’s still the case here, but both of them were fair and decent in their responses, even when asked if they still have a relationship with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

The result of the AMA is more insight into where they see Gemini going, and the Bitcoin space broadly.

Here’s the best questions and answers.

Q: What have you done with Gemini to ensure I’m not “gox’d” (a reference to the collapse of the Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange) out of my coins if I choose to use your service?

A: So we built from ground one with a security first mentality, our first 3 hires were security experts. Our chief security officer was the head of security for AirBNB, something like a 15 or 20B company so it’s quite large. He also worked on Google Wallet and at Microsoft with the highly touted security group. We’ve used the best practices, multi-signature technology, hardware security modules, geographically distributed vault systems we’ve spent about a year and a half building state of the art both to prevent from external hacks and internal malfeasance and any type of errors. You know this has been the most important thing for us to think about. We take security really seriously and we recognize that security has been pretty much the downfall of Bitcoin companies before and we’ve tried to learn from that and build the best product possible.

Q: When will you offer Gemini to EU people?

A: We’re working really hard to expand our offering and areas of operation to Europe and Asia. Unfortunately I can’t give you a specific date, but we know that Gemini is more interesting to our customers if it’s open in as many jurisdictions as possible. So we want this to happen as much as you guys do so we’re working very hard to get to Europe and Asia as soon as possible, but we need to do so in the right way and work with regulators and make sure we’re licensed and ready for you guys.

Q: Do you plan to add futures contracts like OKC/or a margin/swap system like BFX?, or both possibly?

A: We’re definitely looking at expanding the exchange offering but we want to stay super focused on first things first – and that was getting licensed in the state of New York and having a successful launch but suffice to say we are working hard to expand our airs of operation.

Q: What is the plan to bring initial liquidity to the exchange?

A: We have institutional market makers who are going to be providing liquidity on the exchange and we have a lot of demand from just retail and individuals and also other institutions who want to buy and sell bitcoin, so we think the combination of all the customers and also institutional market makers will make a lively and liquid market.

Q: What other cryptocurrencies would you like to see traded on the exchange?

We’ve discussed internally Litecoin and we’re definitely open to other cryptocurrencies. You’ll notice that we didn’t put the name ‘bit’ in our name on purpose – with that said, we’re going to wait to an extent to see what the users are demanding and what people are asking for, rather than try to guess ourselves.

Q: What makes your exchange different than all the other ones, and why should we trade on it?

I think to some extent, you’ll have to come and see for yourself. We focused over the past year and a half on the four crucial pillars of our business – which we believe are product, security, compliance and licensing. Our view of the world is that you have to get all four completely right. I think we did that and I think at least from a product standpoint, which is what users will see the most of, I think we built a very simple and elegant and powerful platform that anyone – from sort of a casual bitcoin user to an institutional trader will be able to harness and use to great effect, I think that we built a really interesting, secure, cold storage vaulting system and we’ve taken licensing and compliance very seriously, which should hopefully be music to most people’s ears who have been in bitcoin and have seen some of the catastrophic failures that have happened over the past couple of years.

Q: What is the Gemini use case for the regular Joe trying to diversify his assets?

A: I think in a lot of ways, bitcoin can be viewed as a ‘digital gold’ or ‘gold 2.0’, so if you allocate some portion of your assets to gold (probably for disaster insurance, or to hedge against inflation) – you should probably be looking towards bitcoin as another possible alternative to gold.

Q: What is in the immediate future for Bitcoin?

A: I think that right now bitcoin is like the Internet pre-broadband and it’s pretty hard to imagine the Internet fulfilling the promise that it has over the past 20-25 years without that type of infrastructure development. And right now there’s lots of companies like Gemini trying to build the bridges and tunnels and connect the island of bitcoin to the mainland of finance and bringing people into the system. I think using the Internet as an analogy, that’s kind of where we are – we’re pre-broadband and we think that building the infrastructure will be a big part of the growth of the bitcoin economy over the next year.

Image credit: techcrunch/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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