Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini Trust, recently made accusations against Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group regarding the dispute over $900 million of frozen funds. According to Winklevoss, Digital Currency Group is responsible for 340,000 Earn users that have their account frozen. This latest development has brought more attention to the ongoing dispute between the two companies, which has been ongoing since November 2022.
Cameron Winklevoss shared an open letter to Barry Silbert on Twitter:
An Open Letter to Barry Silbert
Barry — today marks 47 days since Genesis halted withdrawals. I am writing on behalf of more than 340.000 Earn users who are looking for answers. These users aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet, they are real people. A single mom who lent her son’s education money to you. A father who lent his son’s bar mitzvah money to you. A husband and wife who lent their life savings to you A school teacher who lent his children’s college funds to you. A policeman, and so many more. All together, these people entrusted more than $900 million of their assets to you. They deserve concrete answers and we are here to get them.
For the past six weeks, we have done everything we can to engage with you in a good faith and collaborative manner in order to reach a consensual resolution for you to pay back the $900 million that you owe, while helping you preserve your business. We appreciate that there are startup costs to any restructuring, and at times things don’t go as fast as we would all like. However, it is now becoming clear that you have been engaging in bad faith stall tactics.
For example, on December 2nd we expressed our belief ‘that getting everyone in a room together as soon as possible will be the most productive path towards reaching a resolution.” You agreed, but stated you would only do so after there was a proposal on the table. On December 17th, a proposal was delivered to you. On December 25th, Christmas Day, an updated version of this proposal was delivered to you. Despite this, you continue to refuse to get into a room with us to hash out a resolution. In addition, you continue to refuse to agree to a timeline with key milestones. Every time we ask you for tangible engagement, you hide behind lawyers, investment bankers, and process. After six weeks, your behavior is not only completely unacceptable, it is unconscionable.
The idea in your head that you can quietly hide in your ivory tower and that this will all just magically go away, or that this is someone else’s problem, is pure fantasy. To be clear, this mess is entirely of your own making. Digital Currency Group (DCG) — of which you are the founder and CEO — owes Genesis (its wholly owned subsidiary) –Si .675 billion. This is money that Genesis owes to Earn users and other creditors. You took this money — the money of schoolteachers — to fuel greedy share buybacks, illiquid venture investments. and kamikaze Grayscale NAV trades that ballooned the fee-generating AUM of your Trust; all at the expense of creditors and all for your own personal gain. It is now time for you to take responsibility for this and do the right thing.
It’s not lost on us that you started your career as a bankruptcy restructuring associate. And it’s not lost on us that you’ve been working desperately to try and firewall DCG from the problems that you created at Genesis. You should dispense with this fiction because we all know what you know — that DCG and Genesis are beyond commingled. Everyone takes orders from you and always has And anything you have done after the fact to pretend otherwise, won’t hold up. If instead. you had put all of this energy towards finding a resolution, we would have been done by now. Everyone would be in a better place, including you.
Earn users are tired. They’re scared. Many are now in dire straits. And yet despite all that they have had to endure, they have been remarkably patient and supportive. But there is only so much more they can take. They deserve a resolution for a recovery of the assets they lent to you and an end to this nightmare. To that end, and for the final time, we are asking you to publicly commit to working together to solve this problem by January 8th, 2023. We remain ready and willing to work with you, but time is running out.
Sincerely,
Cameron Winklevoss
The feud went on with a public response from Barry Silbert who mentioned that DCG did not borrow $1.675 billion from Genesis DCG has never missed an interest payment to Genesis and is current on all loans outstanding; next loan maturity is May 2023 DCG delivered to Genesis and your advisors a proposal on December 29th and has not received any response.
Cameron Winklevoss persisted on the fact that DCG is behind the current mess and that they are the ones who have put Genesis at the edge of bankruptcy by owing $1.675 Billion of Genesis.- He also requested Barry to commit to solving this by January 8th in a manner that treats the $1.1 billion promissory note as $1.1 billion.
However, a huge part of the Twitter community recalled the fact that, not at any moment, Camero Winklevoss took responsibility to what is happening to his customers who trusted Gemini.