Brock Pierce

Brock Jeffrey Pierce was born in Minnesota in 1980 and grew up in the St. Louis Park area. He appeared in commercials and films from childhood, and as a teenager he was already working in California for long periods.⁠[1]

In the 1990s Pierce appeared in The Mighty Ducks and its sequel, and played roles including the president’s son in the Disney film First Kid. His years as a child actor exposed him to film production, distribution, and young audiences, but his acting career did not carry over into a path as an adult actor.⁠[1]

After ending his main acting work as a teenager, Pierce turned to the internet industry. He brought his experience in film production and in content for young audiences into streaming ventures; this shift took place in an era before broadband was widespread, so the later DEN was both a media experiment and a cash-burning infrastructure and copyright business.⁠[2]

At about 17, Pierce co-founded Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) with Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley. At a time when broadband was not yet widespread, the company sought to produce serialized video programs for young people and distribute them over the internet; it once had several hundred employees and was backed by investors including MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, Dell, and NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

DEN’s spending rose rapidly, its initial public offering plan was withdrawn, and the company went into bankruptcy liquidation around 2000.⁠[3]

As DEN collapsed, several former employees filed civil lawsuits accusing Marc Collins-Rector and others of sexual assault, and named Pierce as a peripheral defendant. Pierce later said he had no knowledge of it and denied any wrongdoing. A default judgment against him was vacated after he appeared in court to contest it.⁠[2]

Pierce was not criminally convicted in connection with these matters. He was once detained in Spain together with others, but was not charged as a result.⁠[2]

After leaving DEN, Pierce moved into the virtual economies of online games and co-founded Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE). Through a global supply chain, the company bought and sold gold, characters, and items in games such as World of Warcraft, becoming a very large real-money trader by the mid-2000s, and it also drew controversy over account security, labor conditions, game rules, and player experience.⁠[2]

IGE’s business depended on game operators’ permission and their account-ban policies.⁠[2]

After DEN, Pierce helped found Internet Gaming Entertainment, organizing gold, accounts, and items from massively multiplayer online games into a cross-border trading business. The company connected European and American buyers with Asian supply chains, and in the process exposed controversies over game rules, labor conditions, account security, and publishers’ property rights.⁠[2]

Pierce said that virtual goods businesses such as IGE connected Asian sellers with European and American gamers, and brought AlipayAlipayAlipay is a mobile payment and digital services platform of Ant Group serving users in mainland China. It launched in 2004 as an e-commerce escrow account and, as of March 2025, connected more than 1 billion consumers with over 80 million merchants. Its operator, Alipay (China) Network Technology Co., received one of the first payment business licenses in 2011. Alipay says it does not support virtual currency trading or related services.Open the full entry its first group of customers.⁠[4]

The businesses that formed around IGE also included gaming media and database assets, later connected with brands such as ZAM Network. As the company developed, Pierce went through the arrival of investors, management changes, and asset transactions; at different points his status included founder, manager, shareholder, or departed figure.⁠[2]

Pierce said that before founding Blockchain Capital, he founded one startup after another, like an incubator.⁠[5]

Pierce said he began engaging with Bitcoin and trying mining around late 2009 to early 2010.⁠[6]

Tether initially issued USDT on the Omni layer of the Bitcoin blockchain, and later expanded to other networks such as Ethereum.⁠[7]

Pierce said he founded Blockchain Capital in 2013 with Bart and Brad Stephens, initially investing in crypto companies jointly with friends before developing it into a dedicated fund. In 2017 the team launched the BCAP tokenized security structure for its third fund; Pierce later left his managing partner role but retains his historical status as a co-founder.⁠[8]

The BitAngels investor network was founded by David Johnston, who used it to recruit a number of early Exodus fundraising investors and board members for the Mastercoin Foundation.⁠[9]

In August 2014, Mastercoin Foundation executive director Ron Gross announced that he was stepping down, David Johnston became chairman of the board, and Craig Sellars continued to lead day-to-day technical development as chief technology officer.⁠[9]

Pierce and Bart and Brad Stephens gradually formalized their early co-investment arrangement with friends into Blockchain Capital. Pierce said the first fund charged no fees, and that the 15 to 20 friends who invested together included Bobby Lee, Charlie Lee, and Matthew Roszak.⁠[5]

After Mt. GoxMt. GoxMt. Gox was an early bitcoin exchange based in Tokyo, Japan. Jed McCaleb turned it into a bitcoin trading site in 2010 and Mark Karpelès took it over in 2011, after which it became for a time the world’s largest bitcoin trading platform. In February 2014 it halted withdrawals and shut its website, saying about 850,000 bitcoins were missing, and it then went through a civil rehabilitation application, bankruptcy, and civil rehabilitation proceedings at the Tokyo District Court; the trustee has been repaying creditors in bitcoin and bitcoin cash since July 2024, and as of October 2026 the repayment deadline had been extended to October 31, 2027.Open the full entry entered bankruptcy proceedings, the Sunlot consortium in which Pierce took part proposed taking over the exchange for a symbolic 1 Bitcoin and compensating creditors through future operations. The proposal still required approval by the Japanese court and through creditor procedures.⁠[10]

Pierce was elected a director of the Bitcoin Foundation in a 2014 member vote. Some members then publicly resigned, citing his past controversies and issues with the foundation’s governance.⁠[11]

Pierce co-founded Realcoin with Reeve Collins and Craig Sellars in 2014, and the project was renamed Tether in November of that year. Realcoin claimed that its tokens were backed one-to-one by fully auditable U.S. dollar reserves, and USDT was initially issued on the Omni layer of the Bitcoin blockchain.⁠[7]

Pierce has said that he was one of Tether’s main founders, but that he never served as a director or officer of the company and was only a passive participant.⁠[12]

In October 2021 Pierce issued a statement saying that in 2015 he had transferred all of his Tether equity without compensation to minority shareholder partners, that he had not been involved with Tether since then, and that he had never received any proceeds from Tether.⁠[12]

Tether was founded in 2014, initially conceived as a way to use USDT for arbitrage between cryptocurrency exchanges; USDT launched the same year.⁠[13]

In 2016 Blockchain Capital announced the first close of its second venture fund, with a management team that included Pierce and the Stephens brothers.⁠[14]

Blockchain Capital launched a tokenized structure in which BCAP represented interests in the fund, attempting to combine regulated securities issuance with on-chain transfer. Pierce took part in this institutional innovation, but BCAP represented fund interests rather than a newly built public blockchain; accredited investor requirements, transfer restrictions, and legal documents still determined holders’ rights.⁠[15]

After leaving the day-to-day management of Blockchain Capital, Pierce took part in co-founding Block.one, which developed EOSIO and conducted a large-scale token sale. He subsequently left Block.one and turned to promoting EOS Alliance, seeking to build a nonprofit organization around governance, community coordination, and dispute resolution for the delegated proof-of-stake network.⁠[8]

After Hurricane Maria, Pierce moved to Puerto Rico and said he was taking part in the reconstruction through the Restart Foundation, solar power aid, university donations, entrepreneurship activities, and impact investing. He also actively promoted the island’s tax incentives for investors and its potential as a business hub for Latin America.⁠[8]

Pierce estimated that of the roughly 1,500 people who had said they would move to Puerto Rico, about 500 had already moved; he also said that hedge fund and private equity people who moved there under the Act 22 tax incentives generally do not invest in startups.⁠[8]

In February 2019 Pierce said he was seriously considering setting up a small venture fund of about $5 million in Puerto Rico, planning over time to invest about $100,000 each in about 25 startups. In response to criticism describing him and those who came with him as a new form of colonialism, Pierce said he understood the criticism, but said they were not conquering Puerto Rico.⁠[16]

In 2020 Pierce ran for president of the United States as an independent candidate and set up the Brock Pierce for President campaign committee. He appeared on the ballot or received write-in votes in only some states, won no electoral votes, and was not the Republican or Democratic nominee.⁠[17]

On July 4, 2020, Pierce announced his run for president of the United States as an independent candidate. Because of his late start, he had already missed candidate filing deadlines in several states. Interviews during the campaign again raised the allegations from the DEN period; Pierce denied the allegations and said he had never been charged with a crime.⁠[18]

In the November 2020 election, Pierce received about 49,700 popular votes nationwide, a vote share of 0.03%, and won no electoral votes.⁠[17]

After El Salvador passed legislation making Bitcoin legal tender, Pierce led an industry delegation that called itself Bitcoin ambassadors on a visit to the country, where it met with officials.⁠[19]

Pierce registered as an independent candidate in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Vermont, with Brock for Vermont as his campaign committee. From October 2021 through the end of 2022 the committee received and spent about $1.63 million in total, of which about $1.3 million consisted of loans from Pierce himself.⁠[20]

On October 15, 2021, the CFTCCommodity Futures Trading CommissionThe U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is an independent federal agency created by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Act of 1974 and operating since 1975 to regulate futures, options and swaps markets; it has treated bitcoin and other virtual currencies as commodities since 2015 and has been chaired since December 22, 2025 by Michael Selig.Open the full entry issued an order against Tether Holdings, Tether Limited, Tether Operations, and Tether International, finding that from June 2016 to February 2019 they had made untrue statements that USDT was fully backed one-to-one by fiat currency, and imposing a $41 million civil monetary penalty. The order did not name Pierce or the other co-founders.⁠[21]