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Gemini (NASDAQ: GEMI) has undergone a significant (and so far unexplained) shakeup within its upper management ranks, while America’s commodities regulator has declared war on states that try to block prediction markets.
- Gemini C-suite shakeup does damage to share price
- Gemini may have lost over $600 million in 2025
- CFTC to fight states over prediction markets’ right to operate
- Yeah, it’s sports betting
- CFTC chairman attending Mar-a-Lago crypto confab
Gemini shares tanked on Tuesday after the company filed a preview of its FY25 earnings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the numbers ain’t great. But the market appears more freaked out by the fact that Gemini abruptly parted ways with its chief operating officer (Marshall Beard), chief financial officer (Dan Chen), and chief legal officer (Tyler Meade), all without any explanation.
In fact, the departures were so abrupt, Gemini said it has yet to enter into separation agreements with any of the departed trio. The company suggested that deals might yet be struck under which each member could provide “additional transition services for a limited period of time in exchange for continued base salary and employee benefits for the duration of such period (but not including any additional incentives).”
Additionally, ex-COO Beard has resigned from Gemini’s board of directors, effective immediately. The company says Beard’s resignation “was not the result of any disagreement between Mr. Beard and the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies, or practices.”
Gemini said it doesn’t intend to hire anyone to replace Beard as COO, instead adding “many” of the COO’s duties—”including revenue-generating responsibilities”—to the list of tasks currently handled by Gemini co-founder/president/director Cameron Winklevoss. Current chief accounting officer Danijela Stojanovic will serve as interim CFO, while associated general counsel Kate Freedman has been named interim general counsel.
Earlier this month, Gemini announced plans to trim its workforce by “roughly 25%” while also withdrawing from markets in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia. The company said it found itself “stretched thin with a level of organizational and operational complexity that drives our cost structure up and slows us down.”
Neither Cameron nor his twin brother, Tyler (co-founder/CEO/director), has so far seen the need to explain the significant executive shakeup at their company via their normally chatty X accounts. (The twins offered a minor ‘update’ to their earlier layoff notice that said nothing that wasn’t covered in their SEC filing.)
After closing Monday at $7.56, Gemini shares sank to a new all-time low of $6.30 in early Tuesday trading before closing at $6.59 (-13%). Since debuting on the Nasdaq last September at $28 and briefly spiking to $37, Gemini’s shares are down over 82%.
Gemini’s year to forget
Gemini’s retreat behind U.S. borders is by no means a recipe for fiscal success, as the company’s mainstay exchange business consistently ranks well below that of its U.S.-facing peers. CoinGecko put Gemini’s 24-hour trading volume at just $30.2 million on Tuesday, a fraction of the $856 million volume enjoyed by Kraken or the $1.4 billion generated by Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN).
Gemini hasn’t yet released its official Q4/FY25 results, but the preliminary estimates of its full-year performance aren’t pretty. The company is forecasting a net loss of between $587 million-$602 million, thanks to operating expenses rising from $308 million in FY24 to as much as $530 million last year.
The surge in expenses was “primarily due to higher personnel-related costs, including stock-based compensation,” as well as more routine items. The company doled out as much as $90 million in stock-based compensation last year, which Gemini has previously blamed on its Nasdaq listing.
Gemini’s net revenue is expected to come in somewhere between $165 million-$175 million, an improvement over the $141 million the company generated in 2024. However, the company admits that much of this growth came from “credit card revenue,” aka the company’s branded-card partnership with Mastercard (NASDAQ: MA). Evidently, the ‘future of finance’ is heavily reliant on prehistoric fiat rails to keep the lights on. Who knew?
Gemini claims to have had “approximately” 600,000 monthly transacting users in 2025, although like its rivals, it uses an extremely broad definition of ‘transaction,’ including customers making withdrawals of some or all of their account balances. Assuming this formula remains constant from year-to-year, Gemini’s MTUs were up 17% from 2024.
We’ll have to wait a while longer for Gemini’s specific Q4 figures, but they likely won’t be pretty. The quarter saw the prices of prominent tokens peak in the first week of October and then enter the swoon from which they’ve yet to recover. Bullish Global (NASDAQ: BLSH) reported a net loss of $565 million in Q4, while Coinbase lost nearly $667 million. So things are tough all over.
Thankfully, Gemini has friends in high places.
CFTC declares war on states that restrict prediction markets
In announcing their staff cull and international retreat, Gemini claimed to be all-in on prediction markets, predicting big things for the Gemini Predictions product it launched last December.
Which could explain why, despite the fact that neither Winklevoss brother saw fit to tweet about the momentous personnel developments at their company, Tyler retweeted (and Cameron retweeted Tyler’s retweet) Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig’s threat to take U.S. states to court if they dare to block prediction markets from operating within their borders.
The explosive growth of prediction markets over the past year has seen them stray far from their origins in universities and thinktanks focused on economic or political events. These days, the bulk of prediction market activity comes from what most state legislators/regulators consider plain old sports betting.
In America, gambling is a matter left to individual states to decide what forms their respective citizens can engage in. For instance, while the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal prohibition on sports betting in 2018, only about three-quarters of U.S. states currently permit wagering, and fewer still permit online wagering.
Hence, the flurry of legal challenges brought over the past year against companies like Kalshi, Polymarket, and the growing number of loss-making crypto operators (Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Gemini, etc.) seeking to offer the lucrative product in all 50 states.
Enter CFTC chair Selig, who on Tuesday published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and tweeted a defiant video in which he revealed that the regulator had filed an amicus curae brief supporting Crypto.com’s Ninth Circuit appeal of Nevada court rulings blocking the exchange from offering prediction bets to state residents.
Selig claimed states like Nevada have mounted “legal attacks on the CFTC’s authority to regulate” prediction markets (‘event contracts’ in CFTC parlance). Selig says the CFTC can’t “sit idly by while overzealous state governments undermine the agency’s exclusive jurisdiction over these markets.”
Failure to intervene in the “nearly 50 active cases” brought by states against prediction markets could mean that individuals in these states “would be barred from access to federally regulated event-contract markets.”
Selig argues that “event contracts serve legitimate economic functions,” citing old-school examples of farmers hedging against weather damage to their crops. Selig rejected claims that the platforms operate in some unregulated “Wild West,” saying they are “subject to rules and regulations that ensure fair outcomes for market participants.”
But Selig’s argument isn’t helped by his hyperbolic claims that America won’t be able to “maintain its status as the global leader in financial markets” if 18-year-olds in all 50 states can’t bet on what color Gatorade will be dumped on a Super Bowl-winning coach.
In a fortuitous bit of timing, Selig’s challenge came the same day that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Kalshi’s emergency motion to stay a Nevada court ruling prohibiting Kalshi from offering sports contracts to state residents. The Nevada Gaming Control Board immediately filed a civil enforcement action to block Kalshi from offering unlicensed wagering in the state.
Gaming attorney Daniel Wallach told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) the ruling was “a major setback” for Kalshi and predicted that the company would appeal this defeat to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yeah, it’s sports betting
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said he appreciated Selig trying to make the ‘legitimate economic function’ argument “with a straight face.” Cox added: “I don’t remember the CFTC having authority over the ‘derivative market’ of Lebron James rebounds. These prediction markets you are breathlessly defending are gambling—pure and simple.”
It’s hard not to see (unless you don’t want to see) that the modern prediction market is basically a sportsbook. Sports accounted for 85% of Kalshi’s notional volume last year, and while Polymarket’s sports share is smaller, it still represents the single largest individual slice of its volume.
And Tuesday saw both Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss retweet Gemini’s promotion of how to ‘predict’ the Olympic men’s hockey gold medal winner. Which could be of major help to, uh, someone, uh, looking to, uh, well, maybe, uh, ensure there’s a large enough supply of tissues in the losing countries to soak up all their tears? Yeah, that’s it. Simply business. Totally functional. Not at all wagering. Now get the tissue factory on the phone.
Earlier this month, Crypto.com spun out its prediction market—now dubbed ‘OG’—into a standalone platform. The announcement emphasized that OG “provides sports fans access to a most comprehensive range of CFTC-regulated sports event contracts,” adding almost as an afterthought that customers could also wager on “financial, political, cultural, and entertainment events.”
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said “our goal is to establish OG as the premier sports prediction market technology with the best customer experience.” And the original announcement of the launch of Crypto.com’s prediction market in December 2024 featured the headline: “Crypto.com launches sports event trading.”
Some states, including Nevada, haven’t stated that prediction markets can’t operate within their borders, merely that they must first obtain the same gambling licenses that gambling operators have obtained. But the crypto sector prefers to view itself as a unicorn immune to traditional regulatory requirements, so here we are.
Meanwhile, the crypto-inspired ‘financialization of everything’ trend shows no signs of slowing, as this week brought an application by Roundhill Investments for new exchange-traded funds (ETF) that track the outcomes of political prediction markets. Bitwise Investments quickly followed suit with similar applications of its own.
Just a thought, but someone on Kalshi, Polymarket or OG should start betting markets based on whether these ETF applications will be approved, and if so, how soon. We need more of these types of ‘legitimate economic functions.’
Quid pro yoyo
It’s perhaps worth noting that Selig wouldn’t be CFTC chairman if it weren’t for the Gemini twins. Trump’s original nominee, Brian Quintenz, became the focus of a fierce lobbying campaign by the Winklevii aimed at convincing Trump that Quintenz’s regulatory priorities didn’t match the president’s (the reality was a little different).
The precise machinations may never be known, but two things we know for sure: the Winklevii put up tens of millions of dollars to support Trump’s political efforts, and the White House ultimately withdrew its support for Quintenz, paving the way for Selig’s nomination.
Gemini’s recent ‘Gemini 2.0’ announcement indicated that its future hinges on the success of its nascent prediction market, based on the twins’ belief that these products “will be as big or bigger than today’s capital markets.” So it’s probably a good thing the regulator overseeing these products owes them a favor (if only indirectly).
But these days, all crypto-focused U.S. regulatory developments seem to have a Trump connection, and this one is no different. For instance, Selig is a featured speaker at the upcoming World Liberty Forum, a one-day crypto confab at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Wednesday (18).
The event is put on by World Liberty Financial (WLF), the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform whose co-founders include the president and all three of his sons. Don Jr. is also an advisor to both Kalshi and PolyMarket and last year invested “double-digit millions” (according to Reuters) in Polymarket via his 1789 Capital venture capital firm.
Meanwhile, the Trump-owned Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) (NASDAQ: DJT) said last October that it was prepping the launch of its own prediction market (Truth Predict) for its Truth Social platform. The technology underpinning Truth Predict is to be provided by Crypto.com, TMTG’s partner on many other crypto-focused projects.
Selig and his SEC counterpart, Paul Atkins, appear to have made it their mission to remove any obstacles standing in the way of crypto operators making a buck. But the growing perception among Congressional Democrats is that this favoritism is particularly acute when it comes to crypto’s ‘first family.’ You could say it’s almost become predictable.
Watch: What’s ahead for crypto regulation? Highlights from Blockchain Futurist Conference 2025
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