Alexander Attar is a NYC-based engineer with 13+ years in backend and distributed systems and a decade of blockchain development.
He is currently part of the Engineering team at Relay, a payments network that moves funds across 85+ blockchain networks. Within his first quarter at Relay he designed Lean VM, the runtime and adapter architecture behind the network's non-EVM integrations, and led the TON (The Telegram Open Network) launch end to end across four engineering teams. He is now driving support for new VMs on the proven architecture.
Before Relay, he spent four years as Head of Protocol at Holograph, where he joined as the first internal engineer and led development of a multichain asset portability protocol. The protocol grew to 11M+ tokens, 600k+ contracts, and 15M+ transactions across 10+ EVM chains, and became a top 10 protocol by message volume through LayerZero. He architected the smart contract system, built the distributed indexing infrastructure, managed protocol operations securing $100M+ in assets via Gnosis Safes, and directed the technical roadmap across protocol and backend teams. He wrote about the full Holograph story on Substack.
Earlier, he was a Senior Software Engineer at Foundation, where he built backend services for one of Ethereum's leading NFT marketplaces, supporting 30k+ users and $150M+ in trading volume. At Optimism, he worked on the Optimistic Virtual Machine, L1-L2 communication systems, and early OP Geth development, the precursor technology adopted by Coinbase for their Base network which has become the leading Ethereum L2. As a Senior Systems Engineer at Infura (ConsenSys), he built high-availability backend services for Ethereum and IPFS in Go, Python, and AWS. At Ujo (ConsenSys), he served as Platform Lead and shipped the first album released as an NFT on Ethereum with Grammy-winning artist RAC in 2017. His five years at Songtrust helped grow the company from a startup into the largest music publisher by volume of registered songwriters worldwide, with work spanning AWS infrastructure, distributed systems, database architecture, and API design.
Day to day he writes TypeScript, Rust, and Solidity, with plenty of Go and Python in his past. He works up and down the EVM stack and now spends much of his time in the Solana ecosystem as well.
Outside of engineering, Alexander is a visual artist and photographer. His work has appeared in Playboy, i-D Magazine, and Opening Ceremony, and for years he has contributed photography to Sustain-Release, the seminal electronic music festival in upstate New York. He holds degrees in Music & Business from Florida State and an M.M. in Music Technology from NYU. When not building, he enjoys cooking, running in Prospect Park, making music, and spending time with his family as a new father.