Bitstamp

Um, this is one you just shared.

"Looks like Robinhood app will be the... uh, will be using Bitstamp, uh, for perps in app, according to their press review." Pretty bearish if you were thinking it was gonna be LidL or Hyperliquid, or obviously potentially the agentic trading of Tiba.

Uh, interesting times.

Interesting times.

...

I mean, interesting.

Bitstamp.

Bitstamp.

I have no idea.

But right now, all I know is that, you know, it's pretty much like if you're registered with Bitstamp, you can go ahead and mint and burn those tokens.

And yes, you need to be KYB'd and stuff like that.

But I don't think that, like for the end user, that doesn't mean anything.

You know, Bitcoin was trading on a lot of different crypto exchanges, and it was not trading at the same price on all of them.

So you might see it trading for $10,000 on Coinbase, and $10,100 on Bitstamp.

And, you know, in theory, there is a 1% arbitrage to do there, trading those against each other.

All right, so you decided to more or less trade Bitcoin or other cryptos, and take some arbitrage advantage, and it, it was profitable, I presume.

I forget the, the exchange that Robinhood Chain acquired a while ago, but it also, you know, gives them access to, to more-

...

European markets.

Bitstamp.

Yeah.

There we go.

It's been about a year and a half now.

We purchased Bitstamp shortly after I joined.

And so really I've been working with the Bitstamp team to help build out those markets and then also build out our market making relationships, right? You know, they're the foundation of our stock tokens product really is making sure that we have good liquidity on chain.

And, you know, that's what I spend my day to day doing.

Yeah.

One, market makers are forefront on both the institutional side and on the retail side, right? So when I kind of went into Robinhood, we have a set of market makers that really help power that retail side.

And so it was interesting to see what they were doing and then also what they were missing on the centralized space in order to offload some of that risk, right? And some of the things that they were missing was really a regulatory first exchange.

And that's what we want Bitstamp to be is this like regulatory first safe place.

In other words, Gemini is now operating under the same regulatory framework as traditional financial institutions in Singapore.

MAS lists Gemini Digital Payments Singapore in its financial institutions directory alongside Coinbase, Crypto.com, OKX, Bitstamp, and Cumberland.

So this puts Gemini on equal regulatory footing with the other major players.

What's the timeline here? When did this process start?

A few years back, I was working for a company called Bitbuy who was bought by WonderFi.

And then WonderFi went around and bought Coinberry, Coinsmart, Bitfo, the clients of Bitstamp in Canada.

So it was accumulating a whole bunch of platforms and it all got consolidated under WonderFi.

And they also bought Coinsquare, which was a another fairly large platform that recently was bought by Robinhood and they closed a deal a couple of months ago.