By Alexander Osipovich, Vicky Ge Huang and Amrith Ramkumar

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are outspoken supporters of President Trump. But they have it out for one of his key nominees.

As the billionaire brothers prepared for their crypto company Gemini Space Station to go public last week, their feud with Brian Quintenz, Trump's pick to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, burst into public.

Quintenz shared private messages from Tyler in which the executive expressed frustration at the Biden administration's crackdown on his company -- and demanded that Trump's nominee help the brothers reopen the matter.

"7 years of lawfare trophy hunting. It's outrageous what they did to us, " Winklevoss wrote in July, according to screenshots of the exchange that Quintenz posted on X.

Quintenz expressed sympathy but declined to weigh in on a complaint that Gemini had recently filed about the CFTC's conduct. A few days later, the brothers contacted President Trump and asked him to pause Quintenz's nomination, according to people familiar with the matter. It has been stalled ever since.

Having backed Trump's campaign and funded Trump-friendly political groups, the 44-year-old twins are now flexing their Washington influence. Like other crypto executives, they are eager to have friendly leadership at the CFTC, which plays a major role in overseeing digital-asset markets.

The Winklevoss brothers' campaign against Quintenz, a pro-crypto Republican who has been endorsed by an array of industry groups, has puzzled observers.

"It's a total temper tantrum," said Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow at Duke University and critic of the crypto industry. "This is about wanting revenge and wanting to punish people...It's not necessarily about policy going forward."

The "Winklevii," as the brothers are known, have a history of high-profile fights. In a legal battle immortalized in the movie "The Social Network," they accused fellow Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea to create Facebook. The former Olympic rowers eventually won a $65 million cash-and-stock settlement.

They became tech investors and began buying bitcoin in 2012, when it was worth less than $10. The next year, they attempted to launch the first exchange-traded fund tracking bitcoin, but failed to win approval from a skeptical Securities and Exchange Commission.

Gemini, a crypto exchange launched by the twins in 2014, raised $425 million from its recent initial public offering. Together, the brothers own about 75 million shares of Gemini and control 94.7% of the voting power.

After a first-day pop, Gemini shares have slumped more than 20% this week, falling below their IPO price of $28 per share. Although it has a well-established brand, Gemini has lost money in recent quarters and faces competition from larger rivals such as Coinbase Global.

In last year's election, the brothers backed Trump's presidential campaign and gave nearly $5 million to a pro-crypto group that spent heavily on Congressional candidates friendly to the industry. Last month, the Winklevosses contributed $21 million in bitcoin to Digital Freedom Fund, a new pro-crypto, pro-Trump super political-action committee.

Trump has complimented the Winklevoss twins on their looks multiple times and called them "male models with a big, beautiful brain" during a speech at a bitcoin conference last year that cemented Trump's pivot from a skeptic to a full-throated supporter of crypto. Earlier this year, the Winklevoss brothers joined with White House crypto czar David Sacks, Donald Trump Jr. and other investors to launch a private club in D.C. called Executive Branch that charges a $500,000 membership fee and annual dues.

Tyler Winklevoss's messages to Quintenz were a reference to a $5 million settlement that Gemini reluctantly reached with the CFTC in the last days of the Biden administration, a sore spot for the brothers.

After Trump took office for his second term, Gemini complained to the agency's inspector general that the attorneys behind the investigation engaged in unethical behavior.

"I'm disappointed and surprised that you haven't seen, heard, or read about our complaint yet," Winklevoss wrote in the July exchange with Quintenz that was shared on X.

The Senate committee that oversees the CFTC canceled a vote on advancing Quintenz's nomination, citing a White House request, soon after the brothers contacted Trump. (The brothers' outreach to Trump was first reported by Politico.) Tyler Winklevoss then criticized Quintenz as "not aligned with President Trump" in an interview with the New York Post.

The Winklevosses have benefited from the Trump administration's light-touch approach to crypto enforcement. On Monday, the SEC and Gemini said they had reached a "resolution in principle" to resolve a Biden-era lawsuit. In the suit, which the agency paused after Trump returned to office, the SEC had argued that Gemini violated investor-protection laws by offering a deposit-like product that paid customers interest of up to 8% on their crypto.

The product -- which failed in 2022 after the bankruptcy of a partner company -- was the subject of a separate lawsuit by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who accused Gemini of misleading investors about its safety. Last year, Gemini paid about $50 million to resolve James's lawsuit. The company didn't admit wrongdoing.

Much like Trump, the Winklevoss brothers have called for retribution against officials who, in their view, treated them unfairly. Cameron has called for SEC attorneys who took part in Biden-era lawsuits against crypto firms to be "fired immediately and in a public way." Since the industry's nemesis, former SEC chair Gary Gensler, returned to teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tyler has said Gemini won't hire any MIT graduates.

"It's truly wonderful to see how things have changed and how the pendulum has swung back in the way that it has," Cameron said at a White House crypto summit in March.

Write to Alexander Osipovich at alexo@wsj.com, Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com and Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 18, 2025 13:17 ET (17:17 GMT)

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