New Core Teammate Is An Ultimate Wizard: Meet Grin

Alex Grintsvayg (aka "Grin") played ultimate frisbee with LBRY founders Jeremy Kauffman and Jimmy Kiselak in college. Now he's teaming up with them to create the ultimate decentralized digital marketplace.

Grin has been named LBRY's Chief Infrastructure Officer, but Wizard is probably more descriptive of his role on the team. He will contribute to the technical side of the operation, ensuring LBRY's underlying infrastructure is rock-solid.

With degrees in computer science and psychology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Grin has a unique ability to understand and apply new technologies. He also brings plenty of business knowledge to the table, with six years of experience running startup tech companies. Add to all of that his ultimate-frisbee skills – he played for a national-caliber team for seven years and professionally for the Philly Spinners – and you can see why we've dubbed him the Wizard.

After he graduated from RPI, Grin spent a year doing cognitive research for the US Navy at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, RI. That was as long as it took for him to realize government work wasn't for him.

"The bureaucracy and boredom were unbearable."

From there he went on to found Topscore with Jeremy. The company makes league and member management software for recreational sports organizations. Grin serves as Topscore's CTO.

Three primary factors led Grin to get involved with LBRY: the technology, the concept, and the people.

"I work best when I'm passionate about what I'm doing, and LBRY is at the intersection of several areas that I've been very interested in for a while now: bitcoin, cryptography, economics, distributed systems, and freedom of information. LBRY is an ambitious project, and having a strong team will be key to our success."

Grin said he thinks LBRY has the potential to fundamentally change the way we share information.

"LBRY is brilliant in how it aligns everyone's incentives to create a system that's a win-win for everyone. It acknowledges that people are self-interested and respond to incentives, that price is a powerful signal, that secrecy and centralized authority have a lot of potential for abuse. By designing a system that incorporates this reality instead of hiding from it, LBRY builds a sustainable and mutually-beneficial marketplace where you can get what you want, when you want it, at a fair price, and without any hassles. Who wouldn't want a system like that?"

Grin is a key addition to the LBRY team. He shares our ambition to create the ultimate (heh) decentralized content distribution system.

"I strongly believe that a world where LBRY is popular would be a better world than we have today."