It's very, very expensive to maintain a financial license. You need a lot of money monthly for salaries,accountant, due diligence shit, taxes, compliance, rent, lobby expenses, advertising and many, many other things.
It's a legit business and the legit businesses in the financial field are costing A LOT
Coinbase is doing the same. They have licences in almost all USA...much more expensive than Gemini.
. IMO, they will go bankrupt if nobody will pump money in them(no stupids to "invest" in a black hole from where they will never see any money back).
You need massive volume to make it work. Which is why Coinbase is so upset about the blocksize limits - they cap the amount BTC is used and are therefore a threat to their business model.
on the other hand if you, as exchanger, wants the banks to allow you to use their services and to have the peace of the mind that thyt won't block your account, you need to be financial licensed.
there is the legal aspect too. the police can raid your place anyting if you run a financial business and you don't have a license.
almost all the countries have laws regarding to that.
in USA and Europe, there many people in jail because of this thing. it's not a joke anymore and you cannot say "it won't happen to me"
to be financial licensed you need to respect A LOT of terms, laws and you have many obligations(to pay the taxes, to have external audit, to report transactions, to make REAL due diligence not the joke which is made now , etc) and you need MONEY; tons of cash for lawyes, papers and so on.
if you want to be anonymous like BTC-e is( there are many others), you cannot develop a serious financial business and you cannot grow. Yes, you can make money but not "SERIOS" money and you always have the fear that your money can be locked by banks, gov
also, if you have financial license, you are requested to ask many documents from your clients which can be found as an annoying thing by those who are using BTC. More than that, BTC is mainly used by the black market and these people are not so happy to provide you these infos. In short, you won't have cash flow.
What can you do? You must find stupid investors in order to pump money in your business. This, can't last too long because any investor(even is stupid) will want the money back + profit and...guess what?! you won't be able to provide that.
This business(once you are regulated) will eat money monthly. you cannot run it from your home anymore, you cannot run it alone or with a single partner. You need to hire people, you need to pay salaries, to rent an office, to pay taxes, to pay, pay, pay...and in end you will see that it's not worth it just to be a BTC exchanger....
