What’s cooler than giving away a million dollars? Giving away a billion dollars. The Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler, thrust into pop-culture fame after 2010’s Facebook founding dramatization The Social Network, reached a settlement Wednesday (Feb. 28) with the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYFDS) to give back $1.1 billion to customers of their cryptocurrency exchange Gemini.
New York sued Gemini in October, alleging that the company had sloppily funneled user funds to Genesis Global Capital, a cryptocurrency lending firm that went belly-up last January, through a program called Gemini Earn. Gemini users were promised 8% “low-risk” returns if they lent their holdings to Genesis, and Genesis in turn lent the money elsewhere. It turns out that the returns were actually very high-risk: Genesis was a big client of the doomed…
