Matthew Blancarte

Matthew Blancarte is a programmer and web-technologist. In his more than 15 years of experience, he has professionally worked full-stack with everything from Photoshop to the Linux Command Line Interface (the latter being where he spends most of his time nowadays…).

His first company, Unique Blog Designs (est. 2006), was a bootstrapped web design firm that specialized in developing custom WordPress themes. During his four year involvement as an active member of UBD, Matthew designed and developed hundreds of custom sites, blogs and small web applications. He also was part of designing and developing UBD’s three successful products: Affiliate Theme, Squeeze Theme, and Sales Page Theme.

In 2010, Matthew was part of the inaugural Seattle TechStars class. He co-founded Highlighter.com, a self-publishing platform for higher education. After several successful pilot programs and two years of development, Highlighter.com merged with panOpen, Inc. to bring OER publishing to higher education.

After nine months with panOpen, Matthew received a unique opportunity to start a new company in Seattle with his previous business partner, Nate Whitehill.  During that time, Matthew consulted as the server architect and full-stack developer for several high-traffic (> 1M monthly visitors) and high-revenue (> $10M collective annual revenue) eCommerce sites.

After two years of consulting as the tech lead for Legion Athletics, Inc. (Aug. 2015 to Aug. 2017), Matthew was hired as their Chief Technology Officer in August of 2017. During his time with Legion, their business has grown significantly, and their E-commerce store has served millions of customers. Through extensive automation of the company’s business logic and optimizing the tech stack used by the company, Matthew has directly enabled the company’s online store to scale.

In the fall of 2017, Matthew and his business partner, Nate, founded a website called CryptoSlate. Having been interested in blockchain and p2p technologies for years, the two wanted to create a space that answered the daily question, “What the heck is going on with the price of Bitcoin?” That led them to build one of the planet’s most popular crypto news and media sites, CryptoSlate.

In his spare time, Matt enjoys tinkering with open-source software of all kinds. Without a preference or prejudice for any particular platform or language, Matthew has extensive real-world experience with PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Ruby + Ruby on Rails, node.js, HTML5, CSS3, Python + Django, Linux Command Line Interface, and more.

• CryptoSlate CTO & Co-Founder
• Legion Athletics CTO