Institutional flow lowers Gemini fees

Gemini is trading margin for durability. The business is increasingly built around banks, hedge funds, and large traders who move tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and care more about tight spreads, custody, and regulatory comfort than paying high commissions. That makes volume look strong while revenue per dollar traded falls sharply, because an institutional BTC trade can be priced at 2 to 3 basis points while retail trades often land around 100 to 130 basis points.

• The fee math is extreme. Gemini estimated H1 2025 volume rose to $24.8B from $16.6B, but revenue fell to $68.6M because institutional volume reached $21.5B, or 87% of total, while retail stayed around $3.3B. More cheap flow lowered the blended take rate from 0.31% to 0.18%.
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• This customer mix fits Gemini’s original design. Gemini was built as a New York trust company with qualified custody, cold storage, and audits, which makes it easier for institutions to park assets and execute large trades. In practice, that looks less like a consumer app and more like a regulated crypto brokerage desk.
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• The closest comparison is Kraken, which also serves heavier traders, but pushes harder into a broader platform for pro traders, payments, and developer built services. Gemini is narrower. It wins when a customer wants compliant execution and custody, not when it wants the biggest retail audience or the richest product bundle.
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This points toward Gemini becoming a crypto prime broker style business. If it keeps stacking custody, stablecoin settlement, and other institutional services on top of low fee execution, revenue will depend less on charging consumers high trading fees and more on owning the regulated workflow institutions use to trade, hold, and move digital assets.