BILLIONAIRE TWINS DONATE TO TRUMP | SEC BACKS OFF CONSENSYS

“Over the past few years, the Biden Administration has openly declared war against crypto,” Tyler Winklevoss wrote in a post on X. “It has weaponized multiple government agencies to bully, harass and sue the good actors in our industry in an effort to destroy it.” On the other hand, he added, “President Donald J. Trump is the pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto and pro-business choice. This is not even remotely open for debate. Anyone who tells you otherwise is severely misinformed, delusional or not telling the truth.

Cameron Winklevoss left most of the talking to his brother. His own short post on X summed up Trump as “Pro-Bitcoin, Pro-Crypto, Pro-Business.”

The twins and their Gemini exchange have faced multiple investor and government lawsuits over the past few years stemming from the 2022 collapse of the high-interest Gemini Earn program. As part of a settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services in February, Gemini agreed to return $1.1 billion to customers and pay a $37 million fine for compliance failures.

Forbes calculates the net worth of each twin at $2.7 billion, tying them for 1,242th place on the Real Time Billionaires List.  Each Winklevoss donated 15.47 bitcoin to support the former president, according to their posts. At Friday afternoon’s price of $64,121 per bitcoin, that comes to about $992,000.

“We are seeing tremendous innovation around actually gaming; it’s a huge area of focus where we are seeing the ability for end users actually owning their gaming assets between games,” he told as many as 1,000 live and online attendees at Iconoclast Thursday. “There’s a lot of activity we are seeing both here in the U.S. and a lot of it also is in Europe. So crypto gaming.”

Another focus was stablecoins. “If you take a very U.S.-centric approach and you say here in America, ‘yeah, we don’t need to use the stablecoin,’ but if you are in a high-price environment, Turkey or Venezuela or Lebanon, bigger places, they are incredibly important. Payments is just what makes the world go around, and I think there’s a huge role to play there.” 

Read more from the third annual Forbes Iconoclast Summit

This week’s announcement became a fait accompli after the SEC approved multiple filings in May to allow the listing of spot ether exchange-traded funds from the likes of BlackRock and Fidelity (though they are yet to begin trading). These filings treated ether as a commodity, and this subject to CFTC jurisdiction rather than the SEC, so a continuation of the ConsenSys investigation would have been inconsistent with the exchange’s position on the asset. Ether is up about 3% since the news broke, suggesting that the decision was largely priced in by investors.

The post said the researcher claimed to have made the transactions under what is known as a bug-bounty program, under which people are rewarded for exposing flaws, but that the researcher initially sought additional compensation in return for revealing the vulnerability.

All funds have since been returned and no direct customer harm was incurred, but a vulnerability of this magnitude found in one of the oldest and most reputable crypto exchanges in the world should make investors think twice about keeping more assets than they need for trading on an exchange.