The Frenemyship of Winklevoss Brothers and Mark Zuckerberg

ZB.com
4 min readJul 11, 2019

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Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were born August 21, 1981 and are identical twin brothers, known as the Winklevoss twins, or just Winklevoss brothers. The brothers were famous American rowers. They competed in the men’s pair rowing event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and co-founded Harvard Connection, later renamed ConnectU, with Harvard University classmate Divya Narendra. They are now successful Internet and Blockchain entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and led a seed-funding round for Bitcoin payment processor BitInstant. In April 2013, the brothers said they owned nearly 1 percent of all Bitcoin in existence at that time. They have Bitcoin holdings worth more than $1 billion.

In 2004, the Winklevoss brothers were awarded $65 million when they sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their ConnectU idea to create Facebook. That fact alone would make us think that Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss Brothers are best friends. Think twice.

Today an article published by Coindesk reported that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, co-founders of the New York-based crypto exchange Gemini, may soon join the Libra Association, the consortium governing Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency.

The article provides us with a few quotes from the brothers themselves, confirming their joining to Libra Association. The quotes are as follows:

“We’re definitely looking at it in earnest and we’re excited about the project,” Cameron told CoinDesk Tuesday.

And:

“Our feeling is, this is the first of many FANG [Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google] companies to have a token project. Our prediction is in the next 24 months almost every FANG company will have a coin or be working on some sort of project.”

The article also mentions the surprise it may cause to the general public given their previous fight over control of Facebook with its CEO, their former Harvard classmate. Coindesk affirms that the brothers and Zuckerberg now want to become “frenemies” with a mutual goal of promoting mainstream crypto adoption, and that the twins are aiming to diversify Gemini’s token offerings by 2020.

The Libra coin has been the hot topic of the cryptocurrency industry for the past weeks. You can see an ongoing argument about it being or not a real cryptocurrency on each crypto related media and social network. Libra’s whitepaper envisions “a competitive network of exchanges buying and selling Libra,” enabling holders to easily convert the coin, backed by a basket of stable government currencies, into local fiat.

According to the article, so far only one crypto exchange, Coinbase, has joined the Libra Association, whose ranks also include traditional financial players such as PayPal, Visa and Mastercard and VC firms such as Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. Blockchain.info co-founder Ben Reeves was part of the original founding team but later parted ways with Armstrong due to a difference in how the Coinbase wallet should operate. The remaining founding team enrolled in the Summer 2012 Y Combinator startup incubator program. In October 2012, the company launched the services to buy and sell bitcoin through bank transfers.

Other reputable and world leader crypto exchanges were founded in that same year. ZB Group was also founded in 2012 and Introduced ZB Exchange in early 2013.

ZB.com (ZB Exchange) provides powerful trading tools such as OTC, C2C, Margin Trading to users around the world. The number of ZB registered users have exceeded 3 million among five trading zones: QC, BTC, ZB, USDT and PAX. ZB Exchange (ZB.com) , ZB Group’s flagship exchange, has listed more than 80 tokens and offers 218 trading pairs, with an average daily trading volume of about US$3 billion. As the world’s leading digital asset trading platform, ZB Exchange has a wealth of experience in blockchain finance. Since its launch in 2013, the security and exclusivity of the platform has also been a key factor in attracting worldwide users. ZB.com is exploring and contributing to the development of the new economy. ZB Group has just celebrated its 6th anniversary on June 30th 2019.

Learn more about ZB Exchanging by visiting www.zb.com.

About ZB Group

ZB Group was founded in 2012 with the goal of providing leadership to the blockchain development space and today manages a network that includes digital assets exchanges, wallets, capital ventures, research institutes, and media. The Group’s flagship platform is ZB.com, the industry leading digital asset exchange. The platform launched in early 2013 and boasts one of the world’s largest trading communities.

Winklevoss Brothers’ Image provided by Shutterstock.com

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ZB.com

ZB.com is the world’s most secure digital trading platform, facilitating the trade and management of digital assets from all corners of the globe.