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MATEWAN DIGITAL
A Crypto Veteran’s powerful legacy comes to fruition
With a personal connection to West Virginia's early coal mining roots, Charlie Kiser founded Matewan Digital Holdings (MDH) with the goal of supporting utility and energy stakeholders who are interested in West Virginia and its energy and digital transformation. From new technologies that go beyond wind and solar, to processes that create synthetic fuels using coal and coal waste, Matewan is leading the effort to use technology to expand our country's energy output while supporting grid stability. Charlie is also the founder and Executive Director of the soon the be launched West Virginia Digital Asset Council, a nonprofit association educating and advocating on behalf of digital asset stakeholders, citizens, and entrepreneurs.
MDH is currently teaming with some of the industry's best energy partners along with a veteran team of digital asset and data center stakeholders. By creating a completely independent vertical operation that supports both AI and growing institutional demand for bitcoin, MDH also helps tackle the need for energy providers who, along with miners, are reshaping the energy grid.
Charlie is a cryptocurrency and technology public markets veteran. Along with his 20 years of technology experience, Charlie recognized and advocated for the disruptive potential for cryptocurrencies and blockchain in 2013 when he joined BitcoinShop Inc. (NASDAQ:BTCS). He recruited executive management, and they took the company public in February, 2014 becoming the first publicly traded bitcoin mining and blockchain company in North America.
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Also in 2014, BTCS created a relationship with Duke Energy and started building out its own large scale bitcoin mining facility in North Carolina.
This experience gave Charlie a unique awareness of the regulatory environment for public companies, and he was one of the leading advocates of Bitcoin participating in the first ever Bitcoin Awareness Day on Capitol Hill in 2014.
Subsequent to his time with BTCS, Charlie was named CEO of Atlas Blockchain Group in April of 2018. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Atlas was one of the earlier public bitcoin mining companies leveraging power from the Grand Coulee Dam. Atlas traded on the Canadian Stock Exchange (CSE) under the symbol AKE.
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Charlie's entire family comes from southern West Virginia. His father's family were anchors in Matewan, West Virginia’s storied history supporting the unionization of the coal mining industry in the 1920's. His grandfather, Charles Kiser was the field representative for the United Mine Workers southern district for 15 years. More famously though, he was one of 19 men that were indicted in the famous Matewan Massacre, where locals fought back against the coal companies to help give miners a voice in the rapidly growing coal economy. John Sayles, novelist, independent filmmaker, and author, who was most famous for movies like “The Big Chill '' captured the emotion, sacrifice and ultimately the bloody conflict in West Virginia. Matewan helped define how currency, value, and work play out in a closed loop economy like coal mining in this labor-uprising film masterpiece.
Charlie is a graduate of West Virginia University, and is committed to helping businesses, governments, families and students leverage the global distributed power of AI, Bitcoin, Blockchain and Digital Assets.