Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, founders of cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, are opening an office in Chicago as their crypto empire expands.
Tyler Winklevoss, Gemini's CEO, announced the new office on Thursday, noting that the Chicago outpost will serve as an engineering hub in addition to Gemini's existing offices in Portland, Oregon and New York City.
"Over the past 150 years, Chicago has grown into a financial powerhouse that is tightly linked to Wall Street and the global financial system at large," Tyler Winklevoss wrote. "This legacy makes it a great home to build the future of money because it has an incredible pool of talented engineers who understand the unique skills and expertise necessary to build best-in class exchange infrastructure that meets the standards established by traditional financial markets."
The Winklevoss twins---who famously sued Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, claiming he stole their ConnectU idea to launch the popular social networking site---founded Gemini in 2014. Gemini is a digital currency exchange that allows people to buy, sell and store bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether and other cryptocurrencies.
The Chicago office is staffed with at least five former Chicago-based Coinbase employees, according to cryptocurrency news site Coindesk. Coinbase announced in April that it was shutting down its Chicago office less than a year after it unveiled plans to hire 100 workers. Around 30 Coinbase employees were laid off when the Chicago office closed.
The news of Gemini's Chicago office comes as the price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed recently. On Wednesday, Bitcoin surpassed $13,000 for the first time since January 2018. The Winklevoss twins, who own a large amount of Bitcoin and other crypto assets, saw their wealth more than double since the beginning of the year, according to Bloomberg. The two own more than $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency.
"The Chicago office will help us continue to scale for the future and continue to build on our existing data centers and direct connectivity," Tyler Winklevoss wrote. "The time has never been more right to double-down on our mission to build safe and reliable institutional-grade infrastructure."
