Alex Skidanov
Alex Skidanov is a leading software engineer and entrepreneur best known as the Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, a fully-sharded, proof-of-stake blockchain built for mainstream adoption. He also serves as the firm’s CEO, responsible for leading the overall strategy and vision of NEAR, as well as overseeing the day-to-day operations of the firm. Alex is a thought leader in distributed systems and blockchain technology. He boasts an impressive background in software engineering, having held leadership roles at prominent technology companies such as Change.org and Microsoft.
Alex Skidanov Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Co-Founder and CEO
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Software Developer
NEAR seeks to improve on earlier iterations of blockchain infrastructure by implementing flexible scaling technology and an improved suite of developer tools.
It empowers builders to create apps that scale to billions of users and across all blockchains and leverages a sharding mechanism to achieve increased scalability and fast, cheap transactions.
It aims to address challenges such as slow transaction speeds, low throughput, and limited interoperability that have been a hurdle for other blockchains.
EARLY CAREER
Alex joined MemSQL, now SingleStore, as Engineer No.1 where he was responsible for building many core features, including storage, sharding, and durability.
He drove several critical projects, including completing the overhaul of MemSQL parser and binder, and providing unstructured data support.
He was also involved in both structured and unstructured data, including work on enabling streaming workloads into column stores, and geospatial capabilities.
RECOGNITION