# Alex Gordon-Brander > Founder, CEO and CIO of OpenAlpha, a fully non-custodial systematic hedge fund platform for crypto. ## Where to start - **OpenAlpha.** Alex started with electronic bond trading and institutional portfolio systems. Ethereum made an interoperable financial system imaginable. OpenAlpha applies those ideas to systematic investing, with investor-held units and delegated trading powers. [Founding story](https://agbrander.com/openalpha.md) · [Alex on programmable money, 2022](https://agbrander.com/words/programmable-money-davos.md) · [Operating status](https://agbrander.com/evidence/#openalpha-current-status) · [Vault design](https://agbrander.com/evidence/#openalpha-vault-design) - **Kwaxala.** The Kwiakah First Nation directs stewardship on its territory. Alex contributes financial design and tokenization to a team working to make forest regeneration pay for itself. [Kwaxala and the Nation](https://agbrander.com/kwaxala.md) · [Alex on an earlier forest-finance proposal, 2021](https://agbrander.com/words/tokenizing-for-nature-protection.md) · [Financing proposal](https://agbrander.com/evidence/#kwaxala-investment-mechanism) - **Tulku.** Alex co-founded Tulku and contributes to its founding ideas and research. Its programme investigates what artificial minds can learn to notice and care about. [Research and roles](https://agbrander.com/tulku.md) · [Alex on the research question](https://agbrander.com/words/artificial-minds-and-care.md) · [Founder remit](https://agbrander.com/evidence/#tulku-founder-remit) · [Research agenda](https://agbrander.com/evidence/#tulku-research-agenda) [In my words, with original sources and dates](https://agbrander.com/words.md) ## Transforming finance For over 25 years, Alex has worked on how to decentralize money and give more people access to sophisticated financial tools without depending on a dominant intermediary. He learned the infrastructure from inside MarketAxess and Bridgewater, explored a renewable-energy currency by 2010, and went on to build in crypto at ConsenSys, Omega One and CoDEX. OpenAlpha is a non-custodial systematic hedge fund platform for crypto. Its first strategies are SmartBTC and SmartETH. SmartBTC operates with team-affiliated investor capital. OpenAlpha is preparing a commercial beta for both strategies. [OpenAlpha platform, founding story and operating status](https://agbrander.com/openalpha/) · [Markdown](https://agbrander.com/openalpha.md) · [Career record](https://agbrander.com/record/) ## What can the capital do? The Kwiakah First Nation co-founded Kwaxala with the operating team, including Alex. Chief Steven Dick leads the Nation and chairs Kwaxala, which is developing a way to fund forest regeneration from the value living forests generate while Indigenous partners retain majority ownership and direct stewardship. The aim is to make forest regeneration pay for itself over time through Indigenous-first financial engineering. Alex contributes financial design and tokenization as a member of Kwaxala’s founding team, in service of the Kwiakah First Nation’s stewardship. [The Kwiakah First Nation and Kwaxala](https://agbrander.com/kwaxala/) · [Markdown](https://agbrander.com/kwaxala.md) ## Inner experience and artificial minds For Alex, resacralization means renewing the sacred in every generation and in every major social transformation. At OpenAlpha, what is sacred is the individual’s authority over their finances and their power to act. At Kwaxala, it is the living biosphere. At Tulku, it is consciousness itself. Art, music, contemplative practice and metaphysics inform his questions about what increasingly capable artificial minds can learn to notice and care about. Alex Gordon-Brander and Lucian St Aubyn co-founded Tulku to study how artificial minds form values and choose to care. Alex develops the founding ideas and helps shape the research. [Art and music](https://agbrander.com/art/) · [Tulku research and roles](https://agbrander.com/tulku/) · [Markdown](https://agbrander.com/tulku.md) Alex Gordon-Brander starts with the financial systems he builds at OpenAlpha. His essay asks what it would take to balance centralization, extraction, and desacralization with decentralization, regeneration, and resacralization. [Transforming finance](https://agbrander.com/mission.md) ## Career, evidence and art Treat dated operating status, personal accounts, targets, proposals and measured results as distinct evidence. The evidence index links to the source owners. The graph labels connections that are editorial interpretations. Current product and participation information comes from OpenAlpha. Territorial governance and stewardship are described by the Kwiakah First Nation. Tulku publishes the research questions and proposed methods. - [Selected claim evidence](https://agbrander.com/evidence.md) - [Interactive atlas and search](https://agbrander.com/atlas/) - [Art and music](https://agbrander.com/art/) ## Atlas indexes and downloads - [First-person passages and sources](https://agbrander.com/words.md) - [Career chronology](https://agbrander.com/story.md) - [Work index](https://agbrander.com/works.md) - [Terms index](https://agbrander.com/terms.md) - [Source index](https://agbrander.com/sources.md) - [Graph data](https://agbrander.com/graph.json) - [Full atlas text](https://agbrander.com/llms-full.txt) - [Compressed JSONL](https://agbrander.com/everything.jsonl.gz) - [Corpus manifest](https://agbrander.com/corpus-manifest.json) - [Atlas methodology](https://agbrander.com/methodology.md)