Rashad was born in Nashville, North Carolina on January 11th, 1993 to Brian and Patricia Alston. His father worked various jobs before taking a job at the local Firestone plant, while his mother worked several jobs at the local phone company, most notably Sprint. Rashad attended North Carolina State University graduating Magna Cum Laude in 2016 with a B.A. in Communication, having played varsity rugby for the university in each year of his undergraduate study.

After graduating from North Carolina State University, Rashad went to work in software - even though he did not obtain a traditional B.S. in Computer Science. During his last few years of undergraduate study, Rashad moonlighted studying programming and software development.

Rashad's first job involved working in network protection at Yahoo! where he learned some of the difficulties that come with working at such a huge scale. After a few years at Yahoo!, Rashad went on the work in B2B software, helping building cloud-based software for auditors at Auditboard.

After a few years in enterprise software, Rashad moved on to his first formal role in the cryptocurrency industry, working as a Senior Software Engineer for Opennode, where he was responsible for building out the payments infrastructure for the company.

Shortly after his stint at Opennode, Rashad went on to work at DuckDuckGo, where he worked on the same type of network protection problems that he was first introduced to at Yahoo!. After a few years at DuckDuckGo, Rashad signed on to work at Fuel Labs where he worked as a team lead for the company's blockchain indexing infrastructure. Notably, the Fuel Indexer project is considered by many to be one of the fastest, most flexible blockchain indexers in the industry.

In May 2016, Rashad moved from Raleigh North Carolina to Riverside California, eventually settling in Los Angeles California. Rashad is also an avid practitioner of the visual and performing arts - painting and playing piano when he has the time.