Alex Leishman had an engineering degree and a consulting job. The job involved PowerPoint. The degree had involved aerospace engineering. Somewhere between those two activities, he began taking programming classes online. One assignment asked him to build a Bitcoin donation website. It is difficult to imagine a more modest doorway into the business of reinventing money.
He had already been interested in alternative currencies. Now there was something he could actually work on. In mid-2013, the assignment made Bitcoin click for him. By the end of that year, he had left Maryland for San Francisco, arriving without a job and enrolling in a programming boot camp.
The ensuing career would pass through a Taiwanese exchange, Stanford, Airbnb and a cryptocurrency investment firm. In 2019, he founded River. Today he combines the roles of founder, chief executive and chief technology officer. He has kept the business focused on Bitcoin while much of the surrounding industry has expanded its menus.
That combination of titles is a useful introduction to his way of thinking. A financial product has a customer-facing promise and a technical mechanism underneath it. Leishman wants to understand both. In his telling, technology and business have become too closely intertwined to assign each to an entirely separate compartment. Keeping them in the same head has practical advantages. It also makes for a rather crowded head.
A career spent getting closer to the machinery
Leishman studied aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, then earned a master’s in computer science at Stanford. His professional biography includes management consulting at Deloitte and an early engineering role at MaiCoin, the Taiwan-focused digital asset exchange. The sequence moved him from advising organizations toward building their systems.
At Stanford, he helped teach the first Bitcoin class under cryptography professor Dan Boneh. It was a fitting place for someone whose interest in money had become an interest in how money could be implemented. The questions were concrete: what must software check, what can a participant verify, and where does the design depend on trust?
After graduate school, he worked on Airbnb’s security team. He then joined Polychain’s investment and engineering teams, concentrating on Bitcoin-related investments and technical infrastructure. Investment work put him near founders and their ideas. Engineering put him near the parts those ideas needed to function.
By the time River took shape, he had seen the sector from several seats. He had helped build an exchange, taught students, worked in security and evaluated ventures. The eventual company joined those experiences: customers would need a usable financial service, and that service would need systems its own team understood.
His public GitHub adds a small, telling detail. The KrakenRuby project credits Leishman and other contributors with building a Ruby wrapper for the Kraken exchange API. It is the kind of artifact that makes an engineering biography tangible. There is code behind the job titles, including software intended to query data and interact with a trading platform.
One asset, several difficult decisions
River began in 2019 with a Bitcoin-centered ambition. Leishman wanted to build an institution for people and businesses saving in Bitcoin. That vision is a prediction about the future, and he presents it as such. His company has to operate in the present while he argues for the destination.
The focus brings a consequence that is easy to miss. Supporting one asset reduces the number of things a team must accommodate, but it hardly makes custody, payments or customer service trivial. The list of assets can fit on a small piece of paper. The work required to serve their owners cannot.
River chose to develop its own custody infrastructure. In his 2024 conversation with Alex Thorn, Leishman discussed the decision to handle custody internally and the importance of security and trust. It placed responsibility for that machinery inside the business rather than leaving it entirely with an outside custodian.
The same conversation covered River Link, a product that lets users send Bitcoin through a text link. Here is the other side of the engineer’s problem. A customer should not need to understand every system behind a transaction to complete it. Making the front door simple can require a great deal of work behind the wall.
Leishman’s professional interests reach into payment infrastructure too. His discussions with Preston Pysh have examined Lightning’s ability to scale and River’s Lightning API. These are questions about how an asset might be used, beyond the familiar conversation about what its price happens to be doing this afternoon.
When eight colleagues became forty-five
In 2021, River grew from eight people to forty-five. The figures describe a company, but they also describe a change in the founder’s working life. A small group can settle many things through direct conversation. A larger organization requires delegation, management and a shared understanding of who decides what.
Looking back on that year, Leishman acknowledged how much he still had to learn. He credited his team with covering his blind spots. There is a useful candor in that admission. A founder can understand a system well and still be learning how to lead the people responsible for it.
He also singled out River Mining as the launch he was most excited about. The company was expanding the ways clients could participate in Bitcoin, while its chief executive was expanding the set of skills demanded of him. Both processes introduced more moving parts.
The next stages brought outside capital. River announced a $35 million Series B in May 2023, led by Kingsway Capital, with participants including Peter Thiel. The financing followed a $12 million Series A in 2021. Those are company funding figures, not a measure of Leishman’s personal wealth. They mark the resources available to pursue the institution he had set out to build.
A promise you can inspect
In September 2024, Leishman announced River’s Proof of Reserves. The idea was to give customers a way to check that the Bitcoin the company held for them was backed by Bitcoin in custody. Advanced users could inspect the accompanying code, while the product also sought to make verification accessible to people without that technical background.
There is a practical tension here. Bitcoin allows someone to hold their own keys. Some people prefer an institution to do the work. Leishman’s response has been to support self-custody withdrawals while providing more visibility for clients who choose River’s custody.
A reserve check answers a particular question. It cannot, by itself, describe every obligation a company owes. In April 2025, River published its 2024 financial statements, and Leishman explicitly explained why the two forms of disclosure belong together. Reserves show one part of the picture; financial statements extend the view to the business around them.
That distinction matters to his story because it brings the argument back to institutional design. Software can make a balance verifiable. Accounting can describe a company’s wider position. Customers need to understand which question each tool answers. Putting both in public gives them more to examine than an attractive interface and a reassuring paragraph.
Proof of reserves
Checks Bitcoin held for clients against custody reserves.
Public financials
Shows the wider financial position, including company liabilities.
The room where the questions mattered
Before River’s more recent disclosures, Leishman was organizing San Francisco Bitcoin developer discussions. He described preparing topics for Socratic seminars, drawing on proposed changes to Bitcoin and Lightning software. The format centered on discussion, with developers able to explain and question the work.
That is a different social setting from the conference keynote. A keynote has a speaker and an audience. A technical seminar has a room full of people who may interrupt the premise. For an engineer, that can be a productive sort of company. The conversation improves when someone notices the part that does not quite follow.
The connection to developers continues through Brink, the nonprofit that funds and mentors contributors to Bitcoin’s open-source development. Leishman serves on its board alongside people including Jonathan Bier. Brink places him close to work on the underlying protocol, beyond the commercial products River sells.
In February 2025, River introduced zero-fee status for qualifying US-based open-source Bitcoin developers and nonprofits that fund them. The announcement said Leishman would personally review applications. For someone running both the business and engineering, it is an unusually direct intersection of those responsibilities: the people maintaining the network become a group the company deliberately supports.
“The most important thing I’ve learned while building River is that focus is critical.”Alex Leishman / March 2025
The casino argument
By 2026, Leishman’s public message was turning toward the incentives inside financial apps. In an April conversation with Mark Moss, and in his Bitcoin 2026 keynote, he criticized the overlap between investing products and gambling. He questioned the direction of platforms that had promised to help customers build wealth.
The complaint makes his earlier decisions easier to read. A business focused on a single asset, custody and longer-term saving has chosen a particular relationship with its customers. An app offering an expanding supply of speculative activities has chosen another. Leishman argues that the distinction should matter to the people building these businesses.
It is also a claim he must make while running a financial company himself. His conviction about Bitcoin does not settle every question about its future. What he can choose is the company’s product direction and the information it makes available. The credibility of his argument depends, in part, on those daily choices.
River’s April 2026 banking announcement brought that direction into everyday money management: direct deposit and bill payment alongside Bitcoin services. River itself is not a bank; banking services are provided by Lead Bank. The distinction is worth understanding because Leishman’s phrase “Bitcoin bank” describes an ambition as well as a product direction.
Still at the workbench
His recent interviews continue to move between systems and people. In July 2026, he joined Isabel Foxen Duke to discuss Bitcoin banking and the decisions behind River. In August, he spoke with Natalie Brunell about what River’s client data suggested about institutional buying and individual selling.
Those appearances carry forward the questions that have followed him since the programming assignment: who will use this, what will they expect, and what must be built to serve them? The scale has changed. A donation website became an exchange job, a classroom became a developer community, and an idea about alternative money became a company.
The amusing detail in the story is that the exit from PowerPoint eventually led to a job with considerably more management in it. Leishman escaped consulting to build things. Building River required him to become the executive responsible for the people, processes and decisions surrounding those things.
He has kept his engineering title. It is a reminder of the work he wanted to get closer to in the first place. The future he describes may take years to arrive, and his predictions remain predictions. For now, there is an institution to run, software to maintain, and a customer who expects the money to be there when it is time to withdraw.