Gemini Restores Service to Exchange After Outage Spooks Investors

Gemini went down today for less than an hour after announcing its lending partner was pausing withdrawals.

By Mat Di Salvo

The Winklevoss twins co-founded the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini. Image: Shutterstock

Crypto exchange Gemini today went down in a server outage for less than an hour, the platform said on Twitter. 

The exchange earlier today told customers that its Earn program lending partner, Genesis, was pausing withdrawals. It was curious timing, then, when Gemini just hours later went down due to an “Amazon Web Services EBS outage,” it admitted on Twitter.

 Gemini reassured users that customer funds were safe. It later said the service was back up and running—and that users could make withdrawals at any time. “Gemini exchange fully back online; all customer funds held on the Gemini exchange are held 1:1 and available for withdrawal at any time,” it said. 

The outage spooked users of the New York-Based exchange, with people writing on Twitter that they were unable to access the service and withdraw funds. 

Gemini also warned customers earlier today that there may be delays for withdrawals on its Earn product—a service that lets users earn interest for depositing idle crypto.

“We are aware that Genesis Global Capital, LLC (Genesis)—the lending partner of the Earn program—has paused withdrawals and will not be able to meet customer redemptions within the service-level agreement (SLA) of 5 business days,” it said.

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Observers, however, aren’t so sure Gemini will be able to make good on that promise. “Gemini Earn is finished, people using it will likely lose money,” crypto trader and economist Alex Kruger tweeted.

The Gemini outage and Genesis withdrawal freeze follow the collapse of FTX, previously one of the biggest exchanges in the world. The FTX crypto exchange, founded by enigmatic former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, filed for bankruptcy late last week after inexplicably losing billions of dollars of investors’ money. 

Genesis cited this “unprecedented market turmoil” for its issues earlier today.