Gemini is one of the small number of crypto venues that operates under a banking charter issued by a US state regulator. That fact is repeated in almost every review of the platform, usually as shorthand for safety. It is worth being precise about what it does and does not mean. A New York limited purpose trust charter governs who Gemini is, how it must hold assets, and which activities require prior approval. It does not guarantee that your coins are insured, and it does not protect you if someone takes over your account.
When you open a Gemini account, the entity on the other side of your user agreement depends on the state address in your account profile. Gemini says so on its user agreement landing page: your use of the platform is governed by the user agreement that corresponds to your state of residence, and residence is defined as the state reflected in the address on your account profile, not necessarily where you live today.
Residents of Idaho, Louisiana, New York, Ohio and Texas contract with Gemini Trust Company, LLC, which describes itself in its own agreement as a New York limited purpose trust company. Residents of the other listed states contract with a different company, Gemini Moonbase, LLC. The two agreements are separate documents with separate terms, and which one binds you is not a choice you make at signup.
Above both sits Gemini Space Station, Inc., a Nevada corporation whose Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker GEMI. According to the Form 8-K filed for 15 September 2025, the initial public offering closed at $28.00 per share for 15,937,501 shares, with gross proceeds to the company of approximately $433.4 million. That filing is public, and it is why investors can now read Gemini's restructuring costs and risk factors as a matter of record.
New York's virtual currency rule, 23 NYCRR Part 200, took effect in June 2015 and is usually called the BitLicense regime. Gemini did not take that route. Section 200.3(c)(1) exempts from the licensing requirement persons that are chartered under the New York Banking Law and are approved by the superintendent to engage in virtual currency business activity. Gemini received a New York Banking Law charter in 2015, and DFS has described it as a limited purpose trust company in enforcement announcements.
The distinction has practical consequences. A limited purpose trust company can exercise fiduciary powers under New York Banking Law section 100, which a BitLicensee cannot do under section 200.3(d). It can also engage in money transmission in New York without a separate money transmitter licence. For a custodian, fiduciary status is what many pension funds and registered investment advisers require before they will place assets.
What the charter does not do is approve products in advance. In an industry letter dated 15 December 2022, DFS told New York banking organisations that they are expected to seek the Department's approval before engaging in new or significantly different virtual currency related activity. Coin listings, stablecoin issuance and sub custody arrangements all sit inside that perimeter. A charter is a supervisory relationship, not a product warranty, and it carries no compensation scheme. Customers of a New York trust company have no access to the Financial Ombudsman Service and no Financial Services Compensation Scheme cover on crypto, unlike customers of an FCA authorised UK firm.
Gemini's user agreement defines two ways your coins can be held. A Digital Asset Account custodies your assets in one or more Digital Asset omnibus wallets. A Gemini Custody account, which the agreement describes as optional, custodies them in one or more segregated wallets. Most retail balances sit in the first structure.
The agreement states that assets in either structure are not treated as general assets of Gemini, that you retain full title to your Digital Assets at all times and bear the associated risks of loss, and that Gemini will not sell, transfer, loan or hypothecate your assets except as required by law or as provided in the agreement.
One provision deserves attention. The agreement grants Gemini a first priority security interest and pledge over assets in your account that have been committed to fulfil an open order or pending transaction. In plain terms, once you place an order, the assets backing it are pledged to Gemini until the trade settles. This is standard in brokerage, and it is still worth knowing.
The Earn programme is the reason readers should care about the difference between segregation on paper and segregation in practice. Under Gemini Earn, launched 1 February 2021, customer assets were lent to Genesis Global Capital, an entity DFS noted was not licensed by the Department. Genesis defaulted on roughly $1 billion in November 2022 and filed for bankruptcy two months later. Over 200,000 Earn customers, including almost 30,000 New Yorkers, could not access their assets.
Being owed an asset is not the same as holding it.
This is the section most summaries get wrong, so it is worth quoting the user agreement directly on what is covered. Gemini states that it maintains commercial crime and specie insurance for a specified amount of Digital Assets on your behalf, that Digital Assets are not 100% insured, and that the policy is made available through a combination of insurance underwriters.
The policy covers three triggers in Gemini's own words: theft of Digital Assets that results from a direct security breach or hack of Gemini's systems, a fraudulent transfer initiated by Gemini, or theft by a Gemini employee.
It excludes one trigger that matters more to most retail users than all three combined. Gemini's agreement states that the policy does not cover any losses resulting from any unauthorized access to your User Account. If an attacker phishes your credentials, swaps your SIM card, or reuses a password from another breach and drains your account, that loss falls on you.
Gemini does not publish a policy limit, its underwriters, or the split between hot and cold storage coverage, so this article will not put a number on them. If a review quotes a dollar figure for Gemini's crypto insurance, ask where it came from.
Gemini is also explicit that Digital Assets are not legal tender, are not backed by any government, and are not subject to Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or Securities Investor Protection Corporation protections. There is no SIPC coverage for crypto held at Gemini, and no equivalent of the protection a securities brokerage customer might assume applies.
Cash is treated differently from crypto, but the protection is narrower than the phrase FDIC insured suggests. Your fiat deposits are held in omnibus accounts at depository institutions. Gemini's agreement says these accounts are in its name and under its control, are separate from its business, operating and reserve bank accounts, and are established for the benefit of Gemini customers.
The same agreement also says that each omnibus account represents a banking relationship, not a custodial relationship, between each bank and Gemini, and that the accounts do not create or represent any relationship between you and any of Gemini's banks.
You are not the bank's customer.
FDIC coverage therefore depends on pass-through insurance. Gemini states that its records permit determination of your balance as a percentage of total customer dollars in a manner consistent with 12 C.F.R. ยง 330.5(a)(2). That regulation is the mechanism by which deposit insurance flows through a custodian to the beneficial owner. Pass-through coverage is not automatic. It depends on the records being adequate, and it pays out only if the bank holding the deposits is placed into resolution or a similar proceeding.
Gemini does not publish the names of its partner banks in the documents reviewed here. If pass-through cover matters to your decision, ask Gemini directly which institutions hold your cash, then verify each one in FDIC BankFind.
The same structure applies to GUSD. Gemini's dollar page states that every GUSD in circulation is fully backed by cash or cash equivalents held across bank accounts, money market funds and US treasury bills, and that the cash portion may be held at State Street Bank and Trust Company, Goldman Sachs or Fidelity. Reserves are attested monthly by the independent accounting firm BPM LLP, which also conducts an examination on one randomly selected business day each month. The Ethereum smart contract was audited by Trail of Bits. Those monthly reports are the only independent check on the peg.
Gemini publishes separate schedules for its ActiveTrader interface, its Gemini Mode interface, transfers, custody and prediction markets. The ActiveTrader spot schedule reviewed here carries an effective date of 1 September 2026, and fees are set by whichever is higher between your trailing 30 day volume and your total asset balance.
| 30-day volume (spot and derivatives) | Maker fee | Taker fee |
|---|---|---|
| $250M and above | 0.000% | 0.020% |
| $20M | 0.010% | 0.050% |
| $1M | 0.050% | 0.100% |
| $25K | 0.250% | 0.500% |
| Below $10K | 0.600% | 1.200% |
Two things stand out. The entry tier is expensive: a retail user placing a taker order through ActiveTrader pays 1.200%, which is above the top of the retail fee range at many competing venues. Derivatives fees are charged in GUSD, and maker fees turn negative (a rebate) at derivatives volume of $50 million and above.
Gemini Mode is different again. Its schedule publishes no fee table at all. It states that fees are calculated when you place your order and are influenced by payment method, order size, market conditions, jurisdiction and asset, and that you see them on the trade review screen before confirming. It also states that Instant and Recurring orders include a spread in the quoted price, and that Gemini may retain excess spread from a transaction.
Transfer fees are published separately and are easier to plan around.
Gemini has been the subject of three significant US enforcement matters in four years, all documented in primary sources.
On 28 February 2024, NYDFS Superintendent Adrienne A. Harris announced that Gemini Trust Company, LLC had committed to return at least $1.1 billion to Earn customers, to contribute $40 million to the Genesis Global Capital bankruptcy, and to pay a $37 million fine to DFS for significant failures that threatened the safety and soundness of the company. DFS retained the right to bring further action if the $1.1 billion was not returned. The Department also found that Gemini Liquidity, LLC, an unregulated affiliate, had collected hundreds of millions of dollars in fees in a way that weakened Gemini.
On 6 January 2025 the US District Court for the Southern District of New York entered a consent order requiring Gemini Trust Company, LLC to pay a $5 million civil monetary penalty and submit to a permanent injunction. Announced by the CFTC in Press Release No. 9031-25, the order found that from around July to December 2017 Gemini made statements to the Commission in connection with the potential self-certification of a bitcoin futures contract that it reasonably should have known were false or misleading.
On 27 May 2026 the CFTC reversed course. In Press Release No. 9236-26 the Commission announced it had joined Gemini in a motion for relief from judgment, having concluded that the complaint should not have been filed and would not have been filed under current enforcement standards. The review found the complaint rested largely on a whistleblower account known to be lacking in credibility, that Gemini was a fraud victim rather than a target, and that requested evidentiary support had been withheld from a Commissioner during the vote on the complaint. The parties agreed the $5 million penalty would not be returned to Gemini.
On 23 January 2026 the SEC dismissed its claims against Gemini Trust Company, LLC with prejudice, in Litigation Release No. 26465, citing the 100 percent in-kind return of Gemini Earn investors' crypto assets.
Two lessons follow. Earn caused real, large scale customer harm that took more than three years to unwind. And enforcement positions themselves can change, which is a reason to read the docket rather than the headline.
Availability is not a footnote. On 4 February 2026 the board of Gemini Space Station, Inc. approved a plan to exit and wind down operations in the United Kingdom, the European Union and other European jurisdictions, and Australia. The disclosure appears in Item 2.05 of a Form 8-K. The business continues in the United States and Singapore. The plan cuts up to 200 employees, approximately 25% of the global workforce as of 4 February 2026, and the company estimated approximately $11 million in pre-tax restructuring charges, substantially all of them in the first quarter of 2026. Its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026 records approximately $7.9 million of restructuring charges for the six month period.
If you are reading this from the UK, the EU or Australia, do not assume you can open an account. If you are in the United States, work out which state entity applies to you, because that determines which user agreement governs your relationship and which terms on insurance and dispute resolution bind you.
Every figure above comes from a regulator or from Gemini's own published documents. Here is where to confirm each one.
Nothing in a regulatory charter insures a crypto balance. What exists at Gemini is a crime policy with three defined triggers and an explicit exclusion for account takeover, plus possible FDIC pass-through on cash that depends on Gemini's records and on the bank holding the money. Read the agreement for your state before you fund an account, and treat any review that calls a platform safe without naming what is insured as incomplete.
Fees, supported assets, availability and insurance terms change frequently. Confirm them on Gemini's own pages and in the regulator filings cited above before acting. This article is for information only and is not investment, legal or tax advice.