Gemini Launches Web3 Design Studio Superlunar

By Stacy Elliott

Gemini’s newest project, Superlunar, isn’t a product or service company.

It’s a Web3 research and design studio that will build on what the Gemini Opportunity Fund began in late 2020, giving $2 million to core Bitcoin developers.

Gemini, which did $116 million in volume over the past 24 hours, is the ninth-largest crypto spot exchange, according to CoinMarketCap.

“Superlunar, LLC is a standalone company from Gemini Trust Company, LLC. Beth Kurteson, one of the founding team members of Gemini, will be the CEO of SuperLunar,” Noah Perlman, Gemini’s chief operating officer, told Decrypt over email. “We couldn't be more excited for her to take the helm of this exciting new company on a mission to develop solutions and solve real problems of Web3 around NFT's, tokenization, the metaverse, and more.”

The 14-person Superlunar team will focus specifically on design and security problems in the Web3 ecosystem. Sometimes that will mean contributing to open-source projects, and other times it’ll mean sponsoring an external developer or team.

“That doesn't mean that we're not going to look to make a return on those problems that we feel we have the solutions for,” Rich Smith, Superlunar’s chief technology officer, told Decrypt. “We're very well positioned to be leaning into some of that community funding side and the relationships that we have there, and supply not just capital funding to Bitcoin core devs and the crypto open-source community, but also technology and open-source software.”

Although the Gemini opportunity fund was created specifically to support Bitcoin devs, Superlunar won’t focus on just one blockchain.

For instance, one of the Superlunar researchers sits on the W3C committee for authentication. Another authored EIP-2981, which created a standard for handling royalty payments for Ethereum-based NFTs.

“And that was a thing that, prior to that standard, was entirely platform dependent. Every [NFT] marketplace had to implement their own royalty system, which, again, maybe made sense in a Web2 era,” Pete Baker, vice president of design at Gemini, told Decrypt. “But with [Web3], if royalties are going to be the thing that brings long term value to creators and artists, there needs to be a standard.”

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