Gemini Co-founders Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss attend the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City, U.S., Sept. 12, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Gemini Space Station won approval from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to operate its own regulated derivatives clearinghouse, a move that gives the crypto exchange a deeper foothold in prediction markets and sets up a potential expansion into perpetual futures trading.
This allows Gemini to clear and settle trades in-house rather than relying on outside infrastructure – giving the company greater control over how its prediction market products function and scale, particularly as it builds toward more complex instruments like perpetual futures (better known as perps).
The stock jumped 8% on the news.
“Given the opportunity size with prediction markets as well as future crypto derivatives, owning and operating the marketplace end-to-end is powerful,” Cameron Winklevoss, cofounder and president of Gemini, told CNBC in an exclusive interview. “It allows us to meet the fast paced, changing environment … and we can deliver a better experience to our customers and be more responsive.”
Across the industry, exchanges are leaning into products like event contracts, futures — and especially prediction markets — to stabilize revenue that otherwise swings with crypto prices.
“We think prediction markets could be as big as traditional capital markets one day,” Winklevoss said. “We are heavily focused on that for the long term but fully intend to expand our derivatives offering in the crypto space beyond that.”
The approval comes on the heels of a lawsuit earlier this month by New York Attorney General Letitia James against Gemini and Coinbase. She argued that the companies’ prediction market products fall under state gambling rules and should require licenses from the New York State Gaming Commission. The CFTC has pushed back, suing New York and arguing that prediction markets fall under federal derivatives law.
Gemini is also facing investor scrutiny following a steep post-IPO drop amid a broader drawdown in crypto prices. Shares popped 14% in their trading debut, trading as high as about $45, but have fallen 90% since then. Bitcoin has pulled back about 30% in the same period.
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Gemini is trading at 52-week lows after its September IPO
“As a crypto-centric business, your fate is to some extent tied to the crypto market,” he said.
Recent investor skepticism has centered on ongoing losses, executive departures and pulling out of international markets and a “company transformation” toward AI (with the recent launch of agentic trading, for example) and prediction markets. A class-action lawsuit in New York alleges Gemini misled investors about its strategy in its IPO.
Winklevoss argued that skeptics who dismiss crypto’s push into prediction markets as a short-term gimmick to boost trading volumes in a bear market are fundamentally underestimating their potential as a powerful,