Officially, Gridcoin gains another paid developer with experience and expertise in C++ to help progress wallet.

For years the Gridcoin community has had a bit of a skeleton crew for a dev team. Over time the Gridcoin wallet client has improved greatly and continues to be maintained with support of the dev team alongside the dedicated community. The compensation has varied for those who currently still do work and spend their time with it. The new developer has agreed to a starting rate for beginning work on solving issues related to synchronizing with the blockchain. This will eventually help take the load off of the team of people who now developing Gridcoin.

c++ developer, worked on the back end of Truthcoin, done a ton of github commits, and also wrote an exchange crypto arb program while running 50 simultaneous coins.
-- PhD in Math and masters in Statistics. He has worked as a risk manager at an Options trading company! (How exciting is that?) So hes also very excited about quant.gridcoin.us.

Quote Source/Announcement: https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/1331-new-coin-launch-announcement-grc-gridcoin/page-1167#entry221092

Edit: a word.