Alexander Attar is a Brooklyn-based engineer with 10+ years in backend and distributed systems and nearly a decade of EVM development. He's been building in crypto since 2012.
Most recently, as Head of Protocol at Holograph, he joined as the first internal engineer and led the development of a multichain asset portability protocol. Over four years the protocol grew to 11M+ tokens, 600k+ contracts, and 15M+ transactions across 10+ EVM chains, with Holograph rising to become a top 10 protocol by message volume through LayerZero. He architected the smart contract system, built 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.
Before Holograph, he was a Senior Software Engineer at Foundation, where he led backend development 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 contributed to OP Geth during its early development. 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 alongside Grammy-winning artist RAC in 2019. His five years at Songtrust helped build the company from a startup into the largest music publisher by volume of registered songwriters worldwide, covering full-stack engineering across AWS infrastructure, distributed systems, database architecture, and API design.
Day to day he writes TypeScript, Solidity, and Rust, with plenty of Go and Python in his past. He's comfortable working up and down the EVM stack and has been spending more time in the Solana ecosystem recently.
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.