Background and career
Brock Jeffrey Pierce (born November 14, 1980) is an American entrepreneur in the cryptocurrency industry who co-founded Tether. As a child actor, he starred in the Disney films The Mighty Ducks (1992), D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994), and First Kid (1996). Following acting, Pierce was involved in online gaming platforms, including Digital Entertainment Network and Internet Gaming Entertainment. He moved on to cryptocurrency around 2010 and was the founder of Crypto Currency Partners, which would later become Blockchain Capital. In this role, he assisted Jeffrey Epstein in becoming an early investor in Coinbase. Pierce ran as an independent candidate in the 2020 United States presidential election.
Pierce was born in Minnesota and appeared in commercials as a toddler. His first major role was playing a young Gordon Bombay in The Mighty Ducks (1992). Pierce reprised the role in D2: The Mighty Ducks. He starred as Luke Davenport in First Kid (1996). Pierce had small roles in Little Big League (1994), Ripper Man (1995), Problem Child 3: Junior in Love (1995), Three Wishes (1995), Earth Minus Zero (1996), and The Ride (1997).
Pierce retired from acting at 16 and joined as a minor partner with Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Schackley in establishing Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), which raised $88 million in venture capital. DEN's goal was to deliver original episodic video content over the Internet aimed at niche audiences. DEN was among dot-com startups that focused on the creation and delivery of original video content online in the late 1990s before the wide adoption of broadband internet access. Pierce produced its first show, a pilot for gay teenagers called Chad's World. As an 18-year-old, Pierce was making $250,000 a year and held 1% of the company's shares. DEN was slated for a US$75 million IPO in October 1999, but the IPO was withdrawn in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Collins-Rector. All three executives subsequently resigned. Layoffs followed in February 2000. While a new executive team led by former Capitol Records President Gary Gersh and former Microsoft executive Greg Carpenter attempted to relaunch in May 2000, DEN filed for bankruptcy and shut down in June 2000.
In 2001, Pierce founded Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), a company that pioneered the MMORPG currency-selling services industry. Between 2004 and 2005, IGE spent more than $25 million buying out seven smaller competitors, including four auction platforms and many fan and content sites. In 2005, Pierce estimated that IGE accounted for about 50% of this online market in the U.S., which has about $500 million in annual volume. Pierce brought in Steve Bannon, formerly of Goldman Sachs and Breitbart News, to seek venture capital, and a deal was made in February 2006 yielding $60 million, of which Pierce took away $20 million for a minority stake. The next year, the company faced a class-action lawsuit. With no assets, the company failed, and Pierce was forced out. Pierce founded ZAM, a network of websites oriented around massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), such as World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Rift, EverQuest, etc., in 2003. The ZAM.com network included gaming websites such as ZAM.com, Wowhead, Thottbot, Torhead, and D3DB. In March 2012, Chinese internet and tech giant Tencent, acquired ZAM.
In 2010, Titan Gaming recruited Pierce to sit on its board along with EA Executive Keith McCurdy. Pierce joined other Southern California angel investors, including MP3.com's Michael Robertson, SOA Software's Eric Pulier and William Quigley, and Jim Armstrong of Clearstone Ventures. Also that year, Titan Gaming purchased the online gaming network Xfire from Viacom. In October 2011, after Xfire received over $4 million in fresh funding from Intel Capital, Titan Gaming and Xfire cut ties and began operating independently. In late April 2012, Titan Gaming announced that it would be rebranded as Playsino, with Pierce as the new CEO and $1.5 million of new funding.
In the early 2010s, Pierce assisted Jeffrey Epstein to invest in various companies in the cryptocurrency space including Coinbase. Pierce sought funds which he would then channel the investment through his involvement in Crypto Currency Partners which would later become Blockchain Capital. Their decades-long involvement was made public in 2026 with the release of the Epstein files. In 2013, Pierce joined brothers Bart and Bradford Stephens in founding venture capital firm Blockchain Capital (BCC), which was reported to have raised $85 million in two venture funds by October 2017. Blockchain Capital raised a third fund using digital security offering on the blockchain, one of the first traded security tokens. Pierce worked with Mastercoin, a startup that raised capital via an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2013. According to Bloomberg, this "kicked off a worldwide ICO craze, with hundreds of startups raising billions of dollars". In March 2014, Pierce and a group of investors filed an offer to purchase the assets of Mt Gox using a Cypriot entity called Sunlot Holdings Ltd. The month before, Mt Gox had shut down operations and filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo after announcing that it had lost 850,000 Bitcoin. Pierce was elected Director of the Bitcoin Foundation in May 2014. Several members of the Bitcoin Foundation resigned over concerns about the directors. The organization announced its insolvency in July 2015.
