Gemini

First, a disambiguation: this Gemini is the cryptocurrency exchange founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, not Google's Gemini AI assistant. They share only a name. The exchange is operated by Gemini Trust Company, LLC, a limited-purpose trust company chartered and supervised by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) — a stricter regime than most US crypto venues sit under.

On custody, Gemini is a custodial exchange that says it holds customer crypto in a mix of cold and hot storage and keeps US-dollar balances at FDIC-insured banks (which insures the cash, not the crypto). Its exchange custody has never been drained by a hacker. The episode that hurt Gemini customers was not a breach of that custody at all but the failure of a lending partner behind the Gemini Earn yield program, covered below. As with any custodial exchange, the risks that remain are that Gemini holds your keys and that your own account can be phished.

Gemini Earn was a yield program that let customers lend their crypto for interest. Gemini did not lend the assets itself; it routed them to a third-party lending partner, Genesis Global Capital, part of Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group (DCG). In November 2022, in the market fallout that followed FTX's collapse, Genesis halted redemptions and froze roughly $900 million of Earn customer assets belonging to some 340,000 users. This was a counterparty failure — Genesis could not return the assets — not a hack of Gemini's own exchange custody.

The situation was resolved through the Genesis bankruptcy. Under a settlement reached in 2024, Earn users received their assets back in kind — the same coins they had lent — and, because those coins had appreciated since the November 2022 freeze, the recovered value came to about $2.18 billion, well above the amount owed at the freeze date. In practical terms, Earn users were made whole. Gemini also reached a separate settlement with the NYDFS over the program.