Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, best known as Winklevoss twins, are crypto investors, American Olympians, and entrepreneurs. The twins were born in New York on August 21, 1981, and were raised in Greenwich. They also rowed for the US in the 2008 Olympic Games held in Beijing. Along with this, they matriculated to Harvard College in 2000 and majored in economics earning an A.B. and graduated in 2004. After that, they joined a University of Oxford to complete an MBA in 2010.
The growth of the cryptocurrency has seen exponential growth in the recent years. But, the year 2017 has been considered as the best year in the history of the cryptocurrency. The price which was below $1000 reached more than $13,000 in the same year. After they invested their funds in the digital currency, the price of the bitcoin has skyrocketed.
The Winklevoss twins, world’s first bitcoin billionaire, had claimed and sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for Harvard Connection, a social networking website. They had shared the idea of developing a social networking site for Harvard students and Mark had promised them to help them with the programming but later Mark could not fulfill his promise, and rather went on to develop Facebook using the similar idea. The court case ran for few years after which even though their bid for the control of the company was unsuccessful, the twins received a settlement of US Dollar 65 million following the legal battle with Facebook.
The twins got to know about the Bitcoin while they were on a holiday in Ibiza in 2012 and later they used certain fund from the settlement fund to invest in Bitcoin in 2013. The twins invested US Dollar 11 million of the payout in Bitcoin which they received as the settlement amount from Mark Zuckerberg. They had paid about $120 each for their Bitcoins. With this, they owned about 1 per cent of all the Bitcoins that have been mined at that time. Shortly after they had invested, the value of Bitcoin dropped by about 80 per cent in 2013. But gradually, the value of Bitcoin started rising. Their bitcoin value grew to be worth more than $1 billion in December 2017 when the price of Bitcoin surpassed $11,700. After they got the ownership of it, the digital currency has increased by 10,000 per cent, making them the first bitcoin billionaire.
In 2015, they launched a digital currency marketplace named Gemini after the regulatory approval that allows investors to buy, sell and store Bitcoins. The digital assets exchange provides a platform so that both the form of money, the existing fiat currency as well as the new age cryptocurrency could be used interchangeably in the future when the world starts adopting the digital currency. At the current moment, Gemini handles million worth of transactions daily providing Winklevoss twins’ crypto-based income. The Winklevoss twins also have their investment in various other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.
The Winklevoss twins had attempted to list their Bitcoin ETF in March 2017, which was initially rejected by Security and Exchange Commission. Recently, the SEC again rejected a second attempt made by Winklevoss twins, to list shares of first-ever bitcoin ETF. However, there is a hope that with the acceptance of the digital currencies worldwide, the cryptocurrency market will be the future of the world.
The Winklevoss twins gained huge success with the ability to take the correct decision of investing at the right time. Their investment decision and risk taking ability led to their success in the crypto market.