Gemini

Gemini is a New York trust company, which is a genuinely higher bar than most places holding crypto have cleared. It answers to the New York Department of Financial Services, it files audited reports, and the Winklevoss twins who founded it in 2014 have been publicly identifiable the whole way through. If your first question about an exchange is "who is legally responsible if this goes wrong", Gemini has a better answer than most of the industry.

Then there is Earn, and any honest listing has to spend most of its length there. Gemini Earn paid interest on deposited crypto by lending it to Genesis, a separate company. In November 2022 Genesis stopped honouring withdrawals, and around a billion dollars of customer assets stopped being accessible — not stolen, not hacked, simply not available. It took until February 2024 for a settlement with New York's financial regulator to commit Gemini to returning at least $1.1 billion through the Genesis bankruptcy, plus a $37 million fine, and until May 2024 for customers to get 100% of their crypto back in kind. The SEC later dismissed its case citing that full recovery.

That ended about as well as such a thing can end, and it is still the most important thing to understand about the place. Customers who had done nothing wrong lost access to their money for eighteen months, could not plan around it, and had no way to make it move. "You got it back eventually" is a materially different promise from "it was safe", and the gap between those two is where the entire lesson lives. A yield product is a loan. When you accept interest on a crypto balance you have stopped being a depositor and become a creditor of whoever is borrowing it, and you are underwriting their credit risk whether or not the page uses that word.

The other thing that quietly costs money is which screen you buy on. Gemini's simple mobile and web interface applies a convenience fee plus a spread that together can run to several percent on a small purchase. ActiveTrader, which is the same account and the same balance behind a busier-looking screen, charges a fraction of that. Nothing about the assets differs. The only difference is which button you press, and the more expensive button is the one the app opens on.

Your coins there are Gemini's coins, in the sense that matters. They hold the keys; you hold a claim. That is true of every custodial exchange and it is not a criticism unique to this one — it is the trade you make in return for password resets, customer support and someone else worrying about backups. It is a reasonable trade for an amount you are actively trading and a bad one for savings you intend to keep for years. Once a balance is large enough that losing it would genuinely hurt, the answer is a wallet whose keys you hold — see what a wallet actually is and not your keys, not your coins.

Nobody at Gemini will ever ask for your seed phrase, and nobody there will phone you about "securing" your account. Support contact always starts from you, through the app or the website you typed in yourself. Every large exchange's customers get targeted by people who know they are customers, and the call that arrives unprompted is the attack in essentially every case.