> Alex Grinman

// founder & engineer

I am the co-founder and CTO at Footprint, and we're on a mission to solve fraud and financial crimes. The movement of money underpins all criminal activity across the world. Every bank, financial institution, marketplace, or any business that touches money is responsible for making sure bad actors can't abuse our financial systems. Footprint created Percy, our AI risk agent harness, to bring balance and give businesses a fighting chance to discover and stop fraud, identity theft, and financial crimes.

Before Footprint, I co-founded KryptCo (acquired by Akamai). We built Krypton Authenticator (now Akamai MFA) to make strong authentication easy and beautiful. I worked across the stack: cryptographic protocol design, product, UX, and iOS engineering.

I spent 5.5 years at MIT, finishing my undergrad in 2015 and my masters in 2016, both in computer science with a focus on cryptography. I wrote my thesis on Natural Language Processing on Encrypted Patient Data with Shafi Goldwasser.

> Projects & Posts

// A collection of posts, articles, and other miscellaneous coms.

August 13th, 2026>Building Tinyboard: a Rust-based platform for e-ink gadget appsE-paper gadgets for family and friends: ESP32 Rust firmware with no main loop, a captive-portal config UI served from flash, and a 3D-printed case that is also just code.
May 1st, 2023>Own the Data, Disown the RiskThe Vault Proxy: a security architecture for maintaining data ownership while transferring risk.
September 26th, 2022>Inside the EnclaveFootprint's core security architecture — foundational systems designed to restore trust through robust security.
May 6th, 2021>No State, Just Gossip! Making tunnelto.dev distributedForget managing global state, see how tunnelto.dev runs its distributed network with a simple gossiping protocol.
June 23rd, 2018>Losing 100 pounds in 276 daysI lost over 100lbs in 10 months by tightly monitoring, recording, and restricting the amount of calories I ate everyday.
January 16th, 2024>Why Vaulting + Onboarding is Better TogetherHow integrating the Footprint Vault with embedded onboarding resolves challenges in handling sensitive data.
March 27th, 2023>Inside the Enclave, Part 2Nitro Enclaves and their practical implementation in Footprint's security infrastructure.
December 31st, 2021>Building a Decentralized Identity Verification system on Solana (Part 1)Replacing SMS verification with decentralized identity and verification built with a Solana smart contract.
July 5th, 2021>Help Net Security: FIDO2 AuthenticatorsPlatform or roaming FIDO2 authenticators: Which one is right for your workforce?
March 29th, 2021>Krypton is now Akamai MFAKrypton is now an Akamai portfolio product: Akamai MFA.
September 19th, 2019>Akamai Technologies Inc. Acquires Authentication Technology from KryptCoBusiness Insider article about Krypt.co's technology acquisition.
June 20th, 2019>All Things Auth PodcastKrypton is built on an end-to-end encrypted pairing protocol.
August 30th, 2018>Krypton's Zero Trust InfrastructureKrypton is built on an end-to-end encrypted pairing protocol.