What makes this unique is the 'official approval process' they largely created themselves - by approaching NY's financial services department seeking approval to execute trades of and storage the cryptocurrency - which was successful.
Gemini has really lead the way in conducting business in the unregulated cryptocurrency market in a way in which they imagine the regulations that may be coming - and securing their business by staying complaint to these possible future regulations. Think of it as a 'better safe than sorry' way to operate.
Eric Winer, VP of Engineering at Gemini posted to their official blog:
"When we began building Gemini over four years ago, we envisioned a platform that would allow customers to trade many virtual commodities. Zcash is a friendly fork of the Bitcoin source code, making it a member of the “Nakamoto Family Tree” of virtual commodities. The Zcash protocol’s cutting edge use of zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (“zk-SNARKS” or “zero-knowledge proofs”) makes it a truly innovative privacy coin that offers confidentiality for peer-to-peer transactions similar to those afforded to fiat currency transfers (e.g., ACH, FedWire, SWIFT, etc.).
We have been working closely with the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) to obtain approval to offer Zcash trading and custody services to our customers as a New York trust company."
ZCash is up nearly 20% today following the news.
Gemini exchange is owned the Winklevoss twins - who once sued Mark Zuckerberg claiming they were the actual creators of Facebook, as seen in the movie "The Social Network".
Author: Mark Pippen
London News Desk
