Reputed American crypto exchange Gemini has been green-lighted by authorities
Reputed American crypto exchange Gemini has been green-lighted by authorities to begin supporting custody and trading of Litecoins (LTC). The Winklevoss twins, who own the exchange, are finally seeing the face of regulatory approval after repeated rejections of bitcoin ETFs by the SEC. The exchange revealed this exciting piece of news though its official Medium post on 12th October.
Eric Winer, the vice president, engineering, of the exchange has intimated to traders that they can begin making Litecoin deposits into accounts they hold with Gemini beginning 9:30 am (Eastern Daylight Time), 13th October 2018, Saturday. The trading part of it is expected to go live three days later on 16th October, Tuesday at EDT 9:30 am.
The exchange already supports three major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC), its closest competitor Ethereum (ETH), and Zcash (ZEC). When introduced, trading in Litecoin will become possible against these three cryptocurrencies and USD. Winer’s post went on to detail the company’s thorough compliance with all banking regulations and requisite procedures it is obliged to complete under the New York State Department of Financial Services or the NYDFS. It also goes on to highlight how its long history of having cooperated with the authorities has led to the green signal. Winer’s post also repeatedly emphasises on Gemini’s policy of giving primacy to security.
Winer added that the company had also been pushing for support to Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at the same time. However, the plans were dropped because the BCH community is planning for one or more hard forks around next month and the situation regarding that cryptocurrency is still rather uncertain.
His post read:
“Some of [the] forks [currently under discussion] lack the replay protection feature that would be required for Gemini to safely support Bitcoin Cash. Because of this situation, we are delaying our launch of Bitcoin Cash deposits, withdrawals, and trading until late November, after the forks have passed and we can evaluate the health of the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem.”
A few days back, Gemini had also announced that it had managed to bag insurance coverage for the virtual assets that are supported for custody, from Aon, a lending services company. This adds to its existing layer of support from the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) coverage it has for USD deposits. The brothers, who seem to be on a roll, have also managed to get NYDFS approval for launching their native USD-pegged stablecoin,while recruiting many high-ranking officials from Wall Street to facilitate its slated expansion into the UK.