Tether

A former child actor best known for *The Mighty Ducks*, Pierce pivoted to entrepreneurship in the late 1990s. He co-founded IGE, a gray-market exchange for virtual currencies in MMORPGs like *World of Warcraft* — effectively an early lesson in operating a dollar-pegged digital currency system. He later co-founded Blockchain Capital, one of the first dedicated blockchain venture firms, and served as a director of the Bitcoin Foundation. That combination — running a real-world virtual-currency marketplace and early-stage crypto investing — led directly to co-founding Tether and structuring USDT. Pierce ran as an independent candidate for President of the United States in 2020.

A software engineer who co-founded Factom (a blockchain-based data integrity protocol) before helping launch Tether — originally called Realcoin — in 2014. He served as its first CTO and was a core contributor to the Mastercoin project (later rebranded as the Omni Layer), the Bitcoin-based protocol on which USDT tokens were first issued. A relatively private technical figure, he stepped back from Tether in the mid-2010s and has since focused on other blockchain infrastructure projects, including work on decentralized identity and tokenization platforms.

Co-founded Tether (originally named Realcoin) in 2014 alongside Brock Pierce and Craig Sellars, serving as its first CEO. Prior to Tether, Collins co-founded Pheed, a subscription-based social media platform that was acquired, as well as Vidify, a music video discovery app. His earlier career was rooted in digital media and consumer technology startups. Collins stepped back from an operating role at Tether relatively early in the company's history and has since maintained a low public profile, rarely giving interviews or commenting on Tether's subsequent growth to a $120B+ market cap.