NEAR Protocol

Erik Trautman is CEO at NEAR Foundation. Building a scalable, dev-friendly blockchain at Near Protocol. Founder of Viking Education, The Odin Project.After teaching himself to code through online resources and attending App Academy in San Francisco, Erik Trautman created The Odin Project, an online, open-source education program that teaches aspiring web developers to code and become job-ready.  In 2013 he started The Odin Project with almost 100,000 members. In 2014 I founded Viking Education, a fully online software engineering program where students don't have to pay until they get a job. Both were acquired in 2017.

Illia Polosukhin is Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. Illia has more than 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a major TensorFlow contributor and manager of the team building question-answering capabilities for the core Google search, as well as an author of several notable research papers.

Alexander Skidanov is the Co-founder of NEAR Protocol, a team of early MemSQL engineers and ex-Googlers building a sharded blockchain with an emphasis on usability.Alexander Skidanov started his professional career at Microsoft in 2009, then joined memSQL in 2011 as Engineer #1, where he worked for 5 years as Architect and Director of Engineering. He is a 2x ICPC medalist (gold in 2008 and bronze in 2005).

Mikhail Kever is Software Engineer at NEAR. She was a senior software engineer at MemSQL for more than 4 years. She is also one of only 6 people to become a 2-time ICPC (2012, 2013) world champion.

Evgeny Kapun, Building NEAR. He is former programmer at Google and 2-time world champion of ICPC.Evgeny has been working in the blockchain industry for more than 7 years. He has achieved top awards in ICPC, Google Code Jam, and other programming competitions.