Big Force Behind NFT Craze Is a Familiar Duo

If you've seen the Social Network, you're familiar with identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, aka The Winklevii. The brothers accused Mark Zuckerberg of ripping off the idea that became Facebook from them, and they eventually reached a settlement of $65 million. As has been widely documented, the Winklevii poured some of the money into the then-nascent Bitcoin and and have become billionaires in their own right with their cryptocurrency trading firm, Gemini. Now a profile at Forbes headlined "Revenge of the Winklevii" suggests the twins are only getting started. They envision a brave new, decentralized world of money and big tech, one that will make the likes of Facebook obsolete before too long. “The idea of a centralized social network is just not going to exist five or 10 years in the future,” Tyler says of Facebook.

"There’s a membrane or a chasm between the old world and this new crypto-native universe," he adds. "And we’re the conduit helping people transcend the offline into the online." One aspect of that is the burgeoning world of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which is leading to jaw-dropping sales of digital art. In fact, the biggest such sale to date was facilitated by a startup called Nifty Gateway, which the twins own. What's more, they bought it from another set of identical twins who continue to run it, Dustin and Griffin Cock Foster. The latter set of twins are competitive rowers, a hobby they picked up after being inspired by the rowing of the Winklevii in, yes, the Social Network. (The Winklevii competed in the Olympics.) Read the full story, which details how the Winklevoss twins see how all this meshes together in their vision of the future. (More Winklevoss twins stories.)