The Winklevoss Twins Acquire Nifty Gateway

Nifty Gateway, a platform which sells and manages Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), has been acquired by the Gemini Trust Company, the exchange announced in a blog post on 19 November.

According to the blog post, the 2018 founded Nifty Gateway today facilitates nifty purchases for some of the most popular crypto games and applications, such as OpenSea, Gods Unchained and CryptoKitties.

Nifties differ from normal cryptocurrencies as they are not interchangeable, but are one-of-a-kind unique asset on a blockchain. The platform also makes nifties accessible to anyone, as it allows users to buy them with a credit or debit card.

One of the reasons the Winklevoss acquired the platform was that nifties’ features make them ideal as a base for crypto collectibles and art. They further stated their belief that collectibles, real-world and digital, will all one day transition to a blockchain in the form of nifties.

Tyler Winklevoss, CEO of Gemini, said in the blog post:

“Non-fungible tokens and the digital goods (and collectibles) they enable will play a major role in the next era of the digital economy. They are the perfect form factor for crypto-collectibles, crypto-art, and much more – laying the foundation for entirely new multi-billion dollar industries to emerge.”

The twins further revealed that the Nifty Gateway, which was the first acquisition made by the Gemini crypto exchange, will remain its own entity, but will be operating within the Gemini family, which will grant it access to Gemini’s secure, institutional-grade infrastructure.

Duncan Cock Foster, one of the identical twins that developed the platform, said in a separate announcement:

“There is a lot of infrastructure that we need in order to build something on the scale that we are imagining. It would be time consuming and tedious to build on our own. But by teaming up with Gemini, we get instant access to a lot of critically important technologies that we would not have otherwise.”