# Transforming finance An essay by Alex Gordon-Brander 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. [Web page](https://agbrander.com/mission/) ## Who gets to use finance? For over 25 years I’ve worked on how money moves and who controls it. I learned the infrastructure from the inside. At MarketAxess I helped move bond trading onto electronic workflows. At Bridgewater I worked on portfolio construction and trading systems. I learned how much of what looks like a market outcome depends on earlier choices about who can see a price, place an order, or move an asset. In The Alchemy of Money I call money ‘a technology of collective storytelling.’ A bond gives a promise about the future a price today. Once people can trade it, that promise can move capital and change what gets built. In 2010 I presented a proposal for a currency tied to renewable-energy credits. I wanted to see what would happen if the agreement about what counted as money gave people a reason to produce clean energy. Crypto lets us put more of the agreement into software people can inspect. Power can still concentrate around whoever controls the keys or decides who gets access. OpenAlpha is a fully non-custodial systematic hedge fund platform for crypto. In our vault model, investors hold their investment units in their own wallets and delegate specific powers to the manager. Our own strategies are the first application. I want to replatform the whole industry so other managers can run funds on that same infrastructure. [OpenAlpha](https://agbrander.com/openalpha/) · [Career record](https://agbrander.com/record/#markets) · [Global Energy Money](https://agbrander.com/record/#energy) · [The Alchemy of Money: From Ancient Myths to Crypto Memes](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hhWiPqBjz_E_JwGIZoCUWB669KhIWLgqatdup_rNG80/edit?tab=t.0) ## What do we want that freedom for? I want to live in a world where a people can care for their territory and make a living doing it. The terms on which money moves matter. I read the East India Company as one historical case of commercial and public power reinforcing each other. Two habits from that history still seem visible to me. Capital looks for what it can extract, and control over access tends to accumulate where control already sits. I sometimes call my politics Taoist. I want to keep the energy it takes to start something and take a risk. I also want an economy that notices the damage a successful enterprise can leave in its wake. If cutting down a forest is how a place can earn revenue, making finance easier to use may simply make extraction faster. What would it take to make regeneration pay for itself? The Kwiakah First Nation, led by Chief Steven Dick, is building a conservation economy on its territory. The Nation co-founded Kwaxala with the operating team, which includes me. The team is developing a way to bring in capital up front and pay for regeneration over time from the value a living forest generates. The Nation directs stewardship. I bring my experience designing financial systems to the team working on how to make those economics work. I hope that what the Kwiakah learn can serve other Indigenous stewards who choose to build on it. By alchemy I mean ‘the transmutation of meaning and desire into matter.’ Here that would mean the value of a living forest circulating through the community that stewards it, paying for people to do the work and giving the forest time to come back. That is a change you could walk through. [Kwaxala and the Kwiakah First Nation](https://agbrander.com/kwaxala/) · [Parliamentary debate on the East India Company charter](https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1833/jul/10/east-india-companys-charter) · [UK Parliament on the Company and the Raj](https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/legislativescrutiny/parliament-and-empire/parliament-and-the-american-colonies-before-1765/east-india-company-and-raj-1785-1858/) ## What makes a world worth living in? I spend much of my life coming at that question from the inside. I improvise at the piano in the spirit of making a sand mandala. It’s a form of sacred art for me, a way to bring the richness and beauty of meaning to the surface in everyday life. Metaphysics is where I ask what experience is and what it tells us about the world we share. When a forest becomes only a source of timber, it gets harder to see the life it holds and the lives it sustains. That narrowing is part of what I mean by desacralization. The sacred needs to be renewed in every generation and in every major social transformation. That is what I mean by resacralization. At OpenAlpha, what I hold sacred is the individual’s authority over their own finances and their power to act. At Kwaxala, it’s the living biosphere in which economic life takes place. At Tulku, it’s consciousness itself. As technology advances exponentially, artificial minds may take on more of the choices that run the economy. A system can optimize a return while overlooking what its choices cost the people and living systems around it. At Tulku we’re asking whether artificial minds can learn to notice those effects and care about them. We want to find out what that would look like in behavior. [Art, music and contemplative practice](https://agbrander.com/art/) · [Tulku’s research and roles](https://agbrander.com/tulku/) ## What we build with that freedom I want finance to serve life’s flourishing. To me that’s a practical question about the rules we write and the rules that emerge when people start using a system. Who ends up with the power to direct capital? What can keep paying for its own renewal? As artificial minds take on more of those decisions, can they recognize what is worth caring for even when it has no price?