Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Friday that they expect Bitcoin to reach $1 million per coin in the next decade. At the same time their company Gemini Space Station entered the U.S. stock market with strong demand for its shares.
The twins, who founded Gemini in 2015 when Bitcoin traded around $380, linked their forecast with the debut of their exchange on the Nasdaq.
Tyler said, “it’s still very much the bottom of the first inning, because we see bitcoin trading at $1 million dollars a bitcoin, if it disrupts gold. And we think Bitcoin is gold 2.0.”
He added, “we think there’s easily a 10x from here. It’s still really early. And I think we’ll be sitting here 10 years from now looking back and saying, ‘Wow, today was really early.’ I think few people actually listened back then, so hopefully more people listen today.”
Gemini’s initial public offering priced at $28 per share late Thursday, higher than the earlier expected range of $24 to $26, according to Bloomberg. That put the company’s valuation at about $3.3 billion. Tyler said, “we’ve come a long way,” during the same CNBC interview.
Demand for shares far outstripped supply. People familiar with the sale told Bloomberg that Gemini drew more than 20 times the orders for the shares available. The company and its bankers decided to stop taking new requests and set an unusual cap on proceeds at $425 million.
Without that cap, Gemini would have raised up to $433 million based on filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sale included an extra investment from Nasdaq, which committed $50 million in a private placement at the time of the IPO. That deal came on top of the capped proceeds and was first reported by Reuters.
The company had already raised the proposed share price before the final sale, moving the range up from $17 to $19 per share to $24 to $26. At the top of that range, Gemini’s value would exceed $3 billion, Reuters reported. The final price at $28 showed how strong the interest was from investors.
The IPO added to a streak of crypto listings. Earlier this week, Figure Technology raised $787.5 million in an upsized offering. CoinDesk owner Bullish and stablecoin issuer Circle also boosted their sales earlier in the year.
The backdrop for these deals included new regulatory wins under President Donald Trump’s White House, more companies using crypto, and rising inflows from exchange-traded funds. Together those factors pushed the sector’s value above $4 trillion.
Gemini’s shares started trading Friday under the ticker GEMI on the Nasdaq. The lead bookrunners for the IPO were Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, who guided the offering through the heavy demand.
Your crypto news deserves attention - KEY Difference Wire puts you on 250+ top sites