The premium generic domain name Gemini.com has been acquired by the Winklevoss twins for a new business venture in the Bitcoin exchange market, that will be US based. The domain name was acquired about October 19, 2014 according to whois history records and was put into use on January 23, 2015.
Whois records show the domain name is owned by Gemini IP, LLC and holds a Gemini Holdings, LLC gmail email address. The website itself links the site with the Winklevoss twins.
This domain sale was very likely a substantial amount of money, as the domain name Gemini.com has been registered since 1994 and owned by the same company since at least 2001 (oldest whois history record at DomainTools) was in use by a company called Gemini Performance Solutions Inc. which is a software company focusing on eLearning products. Gemini has been in business for 30 years. There are currently over 3,265 .com actively registered domain names that simply start with the word “gemini”. Again, this domain name was not easily acquired!
I reached out to past owners of the domain name but sadly haven’t heard back. It always seems that the higher the amount of the domain sale, the less likely I hear back from the sellers! I’m not exactly sure why this is, but I’m pretty sure it’s all related to the $ involved and keeping quiet about it, often because of a NDA!
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss shared some insight into how they choose the name “Gemini” in a blog post (the only one currently on the newly launched site) which is a pretty interesting story:
So, why the name “Gemini”? After white-boarding a list of possible names for several weeks, we settled on Gemini for a host of reasons. Gemini is the Latin word for “twins” and as such, it inherently explores the concept of duality. We were drawn to this both because of the two worlds of money (old and new) that will intersect on the Gemini platform as well as the two-way nature of trade that it will facilitate. But that’s not all. Once we picked our name, a fun fact emerged. We realized that NASA’s Project Gemini was a spaceflight program focused on laying the groundwork for Apollo’s later mission to land man on the Moon. As such, it was coined (no pun intended) man’s “bridge to the moon”. In this spirit, we’ve built Gemini to be “your bridge to the future of money”. Oh, and Tyler and I just happen to be identical twin brothers.
Although there was no direct mention about how they acquired the EMD, it is becoming evermore necessary to own the exact match domain name if you really want to be taken seriously.
I wish I could pinpoint a number on what Gemini.com may have sold for, but you never know the situation with the past owners and the buyers. They could be friends in some way, the past owners may have not really been using the domain, the past owners didn’t want to sell at all… but money talked (A LOT of it), etc. It’s always nice to know a sales price but I can tell you that it would likely make the list of top yearly domain sales over at DnJournal.com for 2014 and likely higher on the list. The top 100 “reported” (I can’t express reported more than enough, as the vast majority of large domain sales go unreported) domain sales ranged from $64K all the way up to the sale of Z.com for $6.7 Million. The top 10 reported domain name sales for 2014 were all $1 Million Dollars or more. I’m not sure if it would rank in the top 10 but the potential is there. Likely a six figure sale though, that has went unreported.
They probably paid in bitcoin, this is an awesome brand in any sector, has to be min $1M
There actually trade name is Gemini Holdings
First they acquired Gemini.co, so this was an upgrade financed with BTC which they sold when the exchange rate was considerably higher.