Alec James is the Ecosystem Growth Manager at Ora Protocol — a verifiable oracle protocol that brings AI and complex computation on-chain. ^[1][2]

Education

Alec James attended Duke University from 2019 to 2023 and graduated with a B.A. Psychology & B.A. Environmental Science & Policy. Afterward, he was accepted for a merit scholarship into Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. ^[1][3]

Career

In January 2020, Alec co-founded You Change Earth — a climate action web app to inform personalized high-impact behavioral change and he served as the Head of Growth until August 2021. He then served as a Product Manager at Fibre until 2022. ^[4]

In January 2022, he co-founded Harkness DAO — an international community of builders developing digital products and he served as the Product Manager until October 2022. He also interned at Common Action and Quantum Temple as a Product Manager where he supported the development of industry-leading products in the impact-tech sector by driving progress at all lifecycle stages. ^[1][5]

ORA

Alec James joined ORA Protocol (fka HyperOracle) in January 2024 as the Ecosystem Growth Manager. Ora Protocol offers an on-chain oracle protocol (zkOracle protocol) that handles arbitrary computations for blockchain smart contracts. With two main products — AI Oracle (OAO) and ZK Oracle, Ora positions itself as an oracle solution for developers, offering practical AI Oracle functionality usable on Ethereum. Additionally, their ZK Oracle is trustless and solely cryptography-based. ^[6]

On February 14, 2024, Ora introduced Onchain AI Oracle (OAO), a set of smart contracts allowing onchain ML inference. ^[8]

"The team released the world’s first product that allows smart contracts, dApps and blockchains to be powered by AI. OAO is based on a standard for combining AI inference and blockchain systems, called Optimistic Machine Learning (opML). This solved the issues of cost and efficiency associated with Zero-Knowledge ML (zkML) and facilitates the use of AI in blockchain systems right now" - Alec James posted on Linkedin^[7]