Winklevoss Capital

The firm’s prehistory goes back to 2003, when Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and their HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry classmate Divya Narendra founded HarvardConnection (later renamed ConnectU); Facebook launched at Harvard a year later, and in 2008 the three reached a settlement with Facebook, receiving $65 million in cash and Facebook stock.⁠[1][1][1]

In 2012, after ending nearly 15 years as elite athletes, the brothers founded Winklevoss Capital in New York as a family office and venture capital firm investing in early-stage startups. That year it began buying bitcoin, at a price of less than $10 per coin, and by year-end had accumulated 1% of bitcoin’s supply. Tyler Winklevoss later explained that in 2012 they judged the most important bitcoin investment to be bitcoin itself, because the best entrepreneurs had not yet entered the space.⁠[1][2][3][1][4][5]

That fall, Winklevoss Capital led a $1.5 million seed round in BitInstant, a New York platform for buying and selling bitcoin, which was announced publicly only in May 2013; BitInstant was then led by CEO Charlie Shrem, had 16 full-time staff, and later ceased operating.⁠[6][6][6][3]

In 2013, the brothers filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust, seeking to create a bitcoin ETF. On September 17, 2013, they presented bitcoin to public-market investors at the Value Investor’s Congress, on a day when bitcoin traded at $132.27. In February 2014 they launched the bitcoin price index WinkDex, intended to price the bitcoin ETF, and over that year added an API and a price calculator and brought it onto the Bloomberg terminal.⁠[1][7][7][2][8][8][8]

Bats BZX Exchange filed a rule change in June 2016 to list shares of the trust. On March 10, 2017, the SEC issued an order disapproving it, on the grounds that the significant markets for bitcoin were unregulated and the exchange had not entered into, and could not enter into, the kind of surveillance-sharing agreement in place for all previously approved commodity-trust ETPs. The SEC did not approve spot bitcoin ETFs until 2024.⁠[9][9][9][9][1]

In 2014, Winklevoss Capital invested in Gemini, the crypto trading platform founded by the brothers, which launched in 2015. By early 2015 its angel portfolio exceeded 40 companies, with its non-bitcoin investments concentrated in logistics, human operations, smart home, consumer packaged goods, and security. In December 2014 it launched a syndicate on AngelListAngelListAngelList is a startup investment platform company based in San Francisco, United States. Founded in 2010 by Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, it began as a mailing list recommending startups to angel investors, went on to launch online fundraising, Syndicates (co-investing), rolling funds, and other products, and later shifted into a fund administration and back-office services platform for venture capital funds and private markets.Open the full entry that let accredited investors co-invest in its deals, disclosing that it was itself an investor in AngelList.⁠[1][1][10][11][2][5][5][5]

On August 27, 2020, Cameron Winklevoss published “The Case for $500K Bitcoin” on the firm’s website, valuing bitcoin through a gold framework: with above-ground gold conservatively worth $9 trillion, if bitcoin continued on its path its price could rise 45-fold to $500,000 per coin; bitcoin was then below $12,000.⁠[12][12][12][1]

In 2023, the brothers made their first donation to the Zcash development organization Shielded LabsShielded LabsShielded Labs is a nonprofit Zcash support organization based in Switzerland, established as a Swiss association in December 2022. It operates mainly on donations and has never received Zcash Development Fund money or block rewards. It leads protocol proposals including the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) and Crosslink, a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus, and after a researcher it engaged discovered the Orchard counterfeiting vulnerability in 2026, it proposed and advanced the Ironwood upgrade together with other development teams.Open the full entry, funding the formation of a team dedicated to Crosslink, a hybrid proof-of-stake layer.⁠[13]

On April 12, 2024, Winklevoss Capital announced a $4.5 million bitcoin investment in the English football club Real Bedford, becoming co-owner alongside bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack, creating “the first-ever football club powered by bitcoin” and fortifying the club’s balance sheet with bitcoin.⁠[14][14]

On January 15, 2025, Winklevoss Capital published a statement of its investment philosophy written by Will McEvoy, describing itself as an early backer of companies such as Flexport and Crusoe Energy and of crypto networks such as Ethereum, Zcash, and Filecoin, and naming four “frontiers” of focus: crypto, space, energy, and bio. As of October 2026, its portfolio page listed about 100 holdings across categories including AI, consumer, enterprise, and space.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][15][16][16]

On October 6, 2025, Nasdaq-listed biotech Leap Therapeutics announced a $58,888,888 private investment in public equity (PIPE) led by Winklevoss Capital to launch a digital asset treasury strategy; Winklevoss Capital would provide capital and strategic support and received the right to nominate two directors, one of whom would be board chair. The deal closed on October 9.⁠[17][17][17][18]

On November 12, Leap announced it would rename itself Cypherpunk Technologies and change its ticker to CYPH, and that it had used $50 million of the placement proceeds to buy 203,775.27 ZEC. Winklevoss Capital was the only institutional investor in the placement, contributing a majority of the total; Will McEvoy, a principal at Winklevoss Capital, became Cypherpunk’s chief investment officer and joined its board. As of August 11, 2026, Cypherpunk held 323,394.38 ZEC, about 1.92% of the circulating supply.⁠[19][19][19][19][20][21][21]

In January 2026, the brothers donated another 3,221 ZEC (about $1.16 million to $1.2 million) to Shielded Labs for long-term protocol work on the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), Crosslink, and dynamic fees. Cameron Winklevoss said a healthy Zcash ecosystem depends on multiple independent organizations contributing at the protocol level.⁠[22][22][13][22][13]

In March 2026, ZODL, a Zcash development organization formed by the former Electric Coin Company team and led by Josh SwihartJosh SwihartJosh Swihart is a technology executive and the founder and CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL). He joined the Electric Coin Company (ECC), Zcash’s developer, in 2018, succeeded Zooko Wilcox as CEO in December 2023 and led the launch of the Zashi wallet; in January 2026 he and the entire ECC team left after a conflict with the board of its parent organization and formed ZODL, with Zashi renamed Zodl.Open the full entry, closed a $25 million seed round led by Paradigm and a16z crypto, with participation from Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, and others.⁠[23][23][23]

On August 18, 2026, Cypherpunk announced that it had formed Cypherpunk Mining through a $33.33 million equity-based transaction with Winklevoss Capital, acquiring about 4.2 GSol/s of Equihash hashrate, about 18% of the Zcash network, which Cypherpunk described as the world’s largest Zcash mining fleet. Under the deal, Cypherpunk bought Z15 Pro machines and their hosting agreements from Moria Mining LLC and Winklevoss Treasury Investments, LLC, paying with a pre-funded warrant to the latter for 43,290,042 shares, equivalent to $0.77 per share.⁠[24][24][24][24][24][24]

At the Zcash Zummit session of the Network State Conference in Singapore on October 9, 2026, Winklevoss Capital investment analyst Maxime DesalleMaxime DesalleMaxime Desalle is a crypto investment analyst and science writer who has written a long-form Zcash guide and a beginner’s introduction to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; he is also a fellow of the Conjecture Institute.Open the full entry was listed among the speakers.⁠[25][25]

Winklevoss Capital: Official website: https://www.winklevosscapital.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

Cypherpunk Technologies: Official website: https://www.cypherpunk.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

X: Public account: https://x.com/winklevosscap (opens in a new window)⁠[26]