Crypto exchange Gemini is moving to go public despite declining revenue and wider losses in the first half of 2025.

Why it matters: The offering will test whether momentum from Bullish and Circle provides coattails to a peer with weaker fundamentals.

By the numbers: In an S-1 filed with the SEC late Friday, the crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins reported $68.6 million in revenue and a $282.5 million net loss in the first half of 2025, compared with $74.3 million in revenue and a $41.4 million net loss in the same period in 2024.

• Gemini posted revenue of $33.3 million in the second quarter, down 5.5% from the same period a year earlier. Net loss grew 374.8% to $133.2 million.
• The company's loss stemmed in large part from a drop in income due to falling valuations of its crypto assets.
• The company is also converting notes and term loans worth $675 million into stock owed to the Winklevoss family office at a 20% discount — contributing to the first-half losses.

Between the lines: Gemini's losses were driven by a mix of declining trading revenue and rising costs across the board.

• Trading volumes — which determine most of Gemini's revenue — have been rising. But the business was bogged down by lower average fee rates and incentives paid to market-makers as it competed with larger players for volume.
• The most dramatic upswing in operating expenses was sales and marketing, which rose 3.5x to $25.2 million in Q2 — the amount it once spent in a full year.

The other side: Coinbase's revenue for the June quarter grew 3.3%, and it reported $33 million in adjusted net income — excluding a $1.5 billion gain on strategic investments, including its investment in Circle.

• Similarly, Bullish said it expects to swing from a loss to a gain in the second quarter.

Reality check: Gemini looks weaker than peers that have recently gone public.

• Circle generates reliable income from reserves backing its stablecoin and has shown profitability, which led to a 168% surge in its stock on its first trading day.
• Meanwhile, Bullish went public with strong revenue growth and priced above range before trading up 84%.

💭 Brady's thought bubble: Traders will inevitably move away from a smaller venue and go to a bigger one. Better spreads. More counter-parties.

• According to CoinGecko, in the last 24 hours, trading volume on Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Kraken all surged above $1 billion. Gemini was at $244 million.

The bottom line: Gemini's IPO is less about fundamentals and more about market timing. Investors who buy in will be paying for exposure to a well-known brand rather than a play on sustainable profitability.

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Congress might not be in session, but the crypto world has been working to make sure staff know investors' priorities.

Why it matters: The next issue for lawmakers to grapple with is the complicated issue of how to regulate the issuance and trading of digital assets.

• It's usually referred to by the shorthand of "market structure" legislation. The House of Representatives sent a version of that legislation, known as the Clarity Act, to the Senate.

The latest: Stand With Crypto, the grassroots crypto group started by Coinbase, mobilized 12,500 emails to members of Congress in a recent push to let them know that these voters support enacting legislation to regulate the digital asset markets.

• The emails reached 432 elected members of Congress (out of 535 members), according to a spokesperson for Stand With Crypto.
• That means that just over 80% of Congress has heard from voters in their district about this issue.

Flashback: We recently reported that the sizable campaign finance war chest the crypto industry has built is complemented by a considerable ground game of organized crypto advocates.

The Fed is closing a program created to place special supervision on bank cryptocurrency programs.

Why it matters: Just when we thought the last vestiges of Operation Chokepoint 2.0 had been ended, another little manifestation of it turns up.

Driving the news: The agency announced Friday that it would shut down its two-year-old Novel Activities Supervision Program, which supervised digital asset endeavors by banks and complex partnerships with nonbanks.

• Oversight is being folded into the Fed's "standard supervisory process."

Flashback: The program was announced in a supervisory letter in 2023, which has now been withdrawn.

• At the beginning of 2023, after the long crypto downturn and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, the Fed was one of the regulators to issue a joint memo discouraging banks and other supervised institutions from engaging in crypto-related activity.
• They've all since withdrawn that direction, but, apparently, some remaining vestiges of the guidance have to be unwound.

What we're watching: Whether or not any more programs like this surface as they shut down.

🗾 Japan has approved a yen-backed stablecoin. (Reuters)

💼 The White House's former crypto point man, Bo Hines, has taken an advisory position with the world's biggest stablecoin issuer. (Tether)

📈 Figure Technology Solutions filed to go public yesterday, joining the flow of crypto-related companies eyeing public markets. (Axios Pro)

🎰 A new blank-check company has filed to raise $250 million to support defense, energy, AI and decentralized finance — but warned retail investors against investing. (The Street)

🚔 A crypto influencer was sentenced for a scheme to trick cloud providers into mining cryptocurrency for him. (Decrypt)

🐾 Trump-family-backed crypto treasury company Thumzup moves into dogecoin and litecoin mining. (The Block)