A Companies House filing from October 12 says that Gemini Europe no longer has Cameron Winklevoss as a director. Winklevoss is a billionaire and one of the people who started Gemini.
Gemini Europe is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange in New York, which serves 29 European countries at the moment.
Cameron Winklevoss and his twin brother Tyler started Gemini in 2014. CoinGecko says that Gemini is now the 10th largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
The twins’ role in the early days of Facebook made them fairly well-known in the mainstream media. This led to a series of high-profile lawsuits in which the brothers asked for millions of dollars in payment for what they said were their contributions to the success of the social networking giant.
People have also paid attention to the brothers because they are generally optimistic about the future of Bitcoin. They often talk about this at events for the industry.
Gemini hasn’t said why the change happened yet, but Decrypt has reached out to the company for more information.
Winklevoss isn’t the only top executive to leave Gemini Europe’s board of directors in the past month. The company’s executive leadership is going through some big changes right now.
Blair Halliday was the managing director of Gemini for two years. This month, he left the company to become the managing director, UK, of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.
In the past month, Gemini has also added a few new people to its Board of Directors.
Gillian Lynch was named director on October 7, 2022, just a week before the company opened in Ireland. This was because the company was the first to get an Electronic Money License (EMI) in the country in October 2020, beating out Coinbase, Stripe, Square, and Meta (formerly Facebook).
Lynch joined the company in April 2021. He is an experienced Irish executive with more than 20 years of experience in financial services, including 11 years at the Bank of Ireland and more than three years at LEVERIS, an Irish core banking vendor.
It’s not clear if Winklevoss’s leaving the board of directors has anything to do with the Irish expansion, but the company did say that “going live in Ireland is the latest step in” its plan to grow in Europe.
Gemini undergoes restructuring
But not only Gemini’s top executives are leaving for greener pastures.
In June 2022, the company said in a memo that it planned to let go of about 10% of its staff because of “current, turbulent market conditions that are likely to last for some time.”
Gemini’s decision wasn’t too different from what Coinbase did around the same time. Coinbase also cut a lot of its staff because of problems caused by the “crypto winter.”