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Winklevoss-Led Gemini Behind Bitcoin White Paper Excerpts on NYC Billboard

The crypto exchange inked a three-year deal for digital signage that was previously home to CNN.

Gemini's new billboard displays a snippet of the Bitcoin White Paper. (Eli Tan/CoinDesk)
Gemini's new billboard displays a snippet of the Bitcoin White Paper. (Eli Tan/CoinDesk)

If you’ve walked by Columbus Circle in Manhattan this week, just south of Central Park on 57th Street in New York City, you may have noticed a mysterious billboard displaying individual words and phrases such as “electronic,” “a solution” and “are lost” with little explanation.

Crypto exchange Gemini has revealed itself to be behind the billboard, pulling the phrases from Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper in honor of its 13th anniversary on Saturday.

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Gemini told CoinDesk it has rented the billboard, which was previously home to the CNN logo, for a three-year period, Gemini’s longest-ever out-of-home ad buy.

The exchange, co-founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, has also turned each of the 105 phrases displayed on its new ad space into non-fungible tokens (NFT), and is selling them in an auction through Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway that ends Saturday.

Gemini declined to provide the purchase price for the ad space, though the ad comes as crypto exchanges ramp up their marketing efforts. Competing exchange FTX has spent lavishly on sports-related branding tie-ups with the National Basketball Association’s Miami Heat and Major League Baseball.

Elsewhere in New York, Tezos bought a prominent slice of the Mets baseball team’s centerfield scoreboard at Citi Field in Flushing, Queens.

Gemini's new billboard (Eli Tan/CoinDesk)
Gemini's new billboard (Eli Tan/CoinDesk)
Eli Tan

Eli was a news reporter for CoinDesk who covered NFTs, gaming and the metaverse. He graduated from St. Olaf College with a degree in English. He holds ETH, SOL, AVAX and a few NFTs above CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1000.

Eli Tan