This is the typical image displayed for Brandon Chez, founder and former CEO of Coinmarketcap

The “Mystery Man” Behind Coinmarketcap

Coinmarketcap continues to dominate the cryptocurrency price-aggregator landscape. There’s no good reason for CMC to be the leader other than the incredible moat it built around itself — being the only well-known price aggregator for cryptocurrencies for almost five years. When it comes to displaying honest, accurate numbers, everyone who’s been in the space for awhile knows that Coinmarketcap is terrible at what it pretends it does best: price discovery.

Due to the overwhelming backlash CMC has received since 2017 due to numerous issues (from delisting Korean exchanges to selling CMC to CZ of Binance fame), Brandon Chez, the “mysterious founder of CMC,” has laid low, despite a valiant effort by Paul Vigna to locate him in early 2018:

This is from the article featured in the Wall Street Journal, showing the listed location of CMC.

Nonetheless, Brandon has now taken on a mythical quality, attempting to become a Satoshi-like figure who no one knows and no one sees. This has enabled Brandon to be a featured speaker behind a wall at conferences and claims journalists “couldn’t unmask him.”

But the truth is less interesting. Brandon is a programmer with a listed LinkedIn history, as Paul Vigna discovered in his article. He lives — or lived — in New York, and that was no mystery either. And Brandon? Well, see for yourself.

Brandon Chez, on the left, featured with his business partner Andrew Prelusky, in a 2012 Kickstarter video.

Brandon Chez can be found on YouTube rather easily because he worked on a Kickstarter project with the current Advertisement Operations Lead at Coinmarketcap, Andrew Prelusky, in 2012. The project, which was successfully funded (it actually raised more than the $2000 requested), was called GameStow. Here’s what the Kickstarter looked like:

The link to Brandon’s old Kickstarter will likely be killed eventually, so an archived link is available here.

Here’s the video they created for the project:

All of the information being posted is publicly available through use of a few solid keyword searches, which include simple words like, “Brandon,” and “Chez”.

Stay skeptical frens.