Crypto Royalty For Brock Pierce, Marc Collins-Rector,
and Chad Schackley nothing was off limits. These guys partied so hard that Pierce
estimated that they blew $16 million in just one year hopping all over Europe.
They flew all over traveling in private jets and went out to all the best clubs.
For Brock Pierce, he was then just a teenager who had “retired” from acting when he was just
17. Even if he was just a teenager, he was already well on his way to making
hundreds of millions of dollars from the companies he would form.
Brock Pierce Brock Jeffery Pierce was born to a
middle-class family in Minnesota on November 14, 1980. His mother was a minister and professional
disco dancer, while his father worked in construction. Brock grew up playing hockey, but he
was never a stranger to the screen. As a toddler, little Brock Pierce appeared in commercials.
But he didn’t get his first major role till he was 12 years old. He played young Gordon
Bombay in “The Mighty Ducks” and was so good that he became a household name for his role.
Then he had a few more minor stints in the next four years in shows such as
“Little Big League,” “Ripper Man,” and “Problem Child 3:
Junior in Love.” His next big role was starring as Luke Davenport in “First Kid” in 1996.
Brock retired from acting in 1997 at the ripe old age
of 17. He had discovered other interests and realized he had a knack for entrepreneurship.
He particularly enjoyed gaming and had a short career as a professional gamer.
He mined and traded gold in the video game World of Warcraft. This would lay the foundation for his
countless other digital money pursuits later in his life, turning him into a billionaire.
DEN At 17, Brock launched a dotcom
startup called Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) with Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Schackley.
DEN was set up to deliver original episodic video content over the internet for niche audiences. It
raised a whopping $88 million in venture capital in its heyday from big companies and investors.
Back in the 1990s, DEN was part of the first set of dot-com startups
that focused on creating and delivering original video content online. This was
before the general public adopted broadband internet access. The startup’s first show was
“Chad’s World,” a pilot for gay teenagers, which Brock produced.
DEN was successful, even though Brock was only a minor partner and held 1% of the company shares.
When Brock was 18 years old, he already earned $250,000 per year. Young and rich,
Brock and his friends explored Europe lavishly. They enjoyed themselves and
were set to cash in on a $75 million IPO in 1999 when their world came crumbling down.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a young man claimed that Collins-Rector had went after him since he was 13
years old at the house Collins-Rector shared with Schackley and Brock. Shortly afterward,
three more young men accused Brock and his housemates of going after them.
Two of the alleged victims dropped the charges against them, while the third one
settled out-of-court for $21,600. The whole fiasco was terrible news for DEN. A federal grand jury
indicted Collins-Rector on criminal charges, and all three resigned as executives of the company,
with several staff members getting laid off till February 2000. DEN eventually
filed for bankruptcy and shut down in 2000, and yet, it wasn’t the end of their trouble.
Brock and his friends continued partying, flying in the best private jets, and having
the craziest experiences they could think of. In May 2002, they were at their Marbella
beach villa when cops pulled up and found some incriminating things. They faced several criminal
charges that were dropped eventually, but it meant that their circus had come to an end.
Internet Gaming Entertainment Amidst all the police troubles
Brock and co were experiencing, he had a fresh business idea. In 2001, he developed the idea of
a company that dealt with MMORPG currency-selling services. MMORPG means “massively multiplayer
online role-playing game,” and it is basically a video game where a large number of people
play different roles simultaneously and earn rewards. The company, founded in 2001 with
Alan Debonneville, was called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) and was based in Hong Kong.
IGE was very successful. It would become the first company to explore this industry,
as many other startups would soon follow suit. Between 2004 and 2005,
IGE spent over $25 million buying out smaller competitors. It bought four auction platforms
and some fan and content sites so that by 2005, IGE accounted for about 50% of
the industry in the US – an industry that had about $500 million in annual volume.
In 2006, Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs and Breitbart News employee came on board.
Brock brought him in to seek venture capital which amounted to $60 million. Out of that amount,
Brock’s cut was a tidy $20 million. But those were the good days. By 2007, the company was in
serious hot water with a class-action lawsuit over “substantially impairing and diminishing
player’s collective enjoyment of the game.” Also, Steve Bannon’s investment hadn’t gone
down well with some former employees, so the company faced a lawsuit from Alan Debonneville,
who had earlier left the company over managerial issues. IGE had no assets to
help it recover from the lawsuits or weather the bad times, so it was forced to close down.
Tether In 2014, Brock launched his latest idea:
Tether, a Stablecoin. A Stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency pegged to a stable
currency or commodity like gold. This is to regulate the price of the coin,
making it a preferred option for many people in carrying out their daily business transactions.
In this case, Tether is pegged to the US dollar. So for every Tether coin in circulation,
there is a corresponding $1 in reserve. Or so Tether made the world believe. It turns out,
Tether isn’t backed by the dollar and investors are left questioning the coin’s legitimacy.
In 2021, the news came out that only 3% of Tether’s supply was backed by actual cash, even
after the company had led investors to believe it was 100% backed. But the company made progress in
increasing its reserve within the next couple of months. In the first quarter of 2022, Tether’s $82
billion reserve was split into 86% cash, which was further divided into 52% in U.S. Treasury bonds,
37% in commercial paper, and 11% in money market and actual cash. The other 14% of its reserve
was channeled into investments, including $4 billion in corporate bonds, 43 billion in loans,
and $5 billion in investment in cryptocurrencies. Tether’s shady business deals have put it at the
center of the current crypto winter, a bearish market that some fear will soon
spill into other investment markets. The company is involved in several lawsuits,
other crypto firms are pointing fingers at them, and investors are losing hope in the company’s
ability to keep their Stablecoin stable. Tether currently has a market value of
$68 billion. Critics believe that if Tether investors completely lose confidence in the coin,
it could set off a withdrawal stampede where every investor is trying to exchange their Tether coin
for dollars. That kind of bank run could collapse the entire cryptocurrency industry.
Lifestyle By many accounts – including
Forbes – Brock is one of the richest men in the crypto space today. In 2018, Forbes named
him in the “top 20 wealthiest people in crypto” list. He had an estimated net worth of up to $1.1
billion. And yet, according to his wife, he is a “nomad who lives out of a suitcase
for weeks at a time.” He married Crystal Rose, CEO of Sensay, a company that builds messaging
systems. They got married in a “smart contract” that can be renewed yearly.
Neil Strauss, in an article for Rolling Stone titled “Brock Pierce: The Hippie
King of Cryptocurrency,” describes Brock as a “Burning Man mash-up of young Indiana Jones,
Theo Greyjoy, and an itinerant street magician.” According to John Oliver,
he is a “sleepy, creepy cowboy from the future.”
His car or one of them is a DeLorean with a license plate that reads
“SATOSHI.” Brock lives on and off in Puerto Rico, with a hippie lifestyle that doesn’t
pay much attention to schedules or structure. He balances hosting parties and conducting between
3 and 10 meetings simultaneously, sometimes strolling down the street carrying a Bluetooth
speaker blasting a remix of the Charlie Chaplin speech from “The Great Dictator.”
Nonetheless, Brock has repeatedly said he doesn’t want to conquer the world, but that he just wants
to change it and help people. And this is precisely why he took on Puerto Rico with
his company of billionaires and millionaires: to supposedly transform the world, starting from the
beloved Crypto Rico or Puerto Crypto, as the crypto community fondly refers to Puerto Rico.
Rugged? Tether is currently run by Bitfinex,
a cryptocurrency exchange owned by iFinex Inc. Bitfinex is every bit as controversial,
maybe even more controversial than Brock and all his past escapades. The company executives have
stolen customers’ money several times and were involved in a Tether scandal in 2018.
Two of its top executives involved in managing Tether are dubious
characters who have been involved in multiple criminal investigations.
In 2018, Tether came under scrutiny for allegedly manipulating the crypto market by
minting new coins to increase Bitcoin’s price. It was like a Ponzi scheme or a money laundry
syndicate using counterfeit currency to buy real assets. Investigation later revealed no evidence
to support the claim, but the damage had already been done to Tether’s reputation. Surprisingly,
Brock claimed he had no affiliation with Tether since he broke off from the company in 2015.
Politics Brock hasn’t allowed his past shenanigans to stop
him from pursuing anything he wants – including politics. In 2020, he ran as an Independent
candidate for the presidency of the United States. His running mate was, to no one’s surprise, Karla
Ballard, an entrepreneur like him. He even got the New York Independence Party to nominate him.
He got endorsements and support from Tim Draper, a venture capitalist, and Bitcoin advocate;
Jesse Ventura, former Minnesota governor, mayor, actor, and professional wrestler;
and Akon, the musician, who was also his chief campaign strategist. If there is one
thing Brock can do, it is get people to rally for him in whatever role he decides to play.
Unfortunately for Brock, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris snagged the White House right
under his nose. He got only 0.03% of the votes, but rest assured he’ll run again.
This time though, he’ll run through other candidates in his new party,
which he was supposed to form in 2022. He later announced that he would run for
Vermont senator Patrick Leahy’s seat in the United States Senate in 2022.
He ended up not filing to qualify for the ballot when he realized running in Vermont could make
him lose his federal income tax-free status as a Puerto Rico resident. And if he loses his
position in the Puerto Rico tax haven, that might wrench his plans to change the world.
As you must know of Brock Price by now, nothing he has encountered yet has stopped him from getting
what he wants. So there just might be a chance for him to find a slot in America’s leadership.
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