OpenAlpha

Why Alex started OpenAlpha

At Bridgewater, Alex worked on the systems that turned investment research into portfolios and trades. He saw what the firm made possible. A researcher could bring in an idea and find the capital, people, and systems to put it to work and manage the risk. Reading the Ethereum white paper gave Alex a question he kept coming back to. Could software make that machinery available to people outside a single firm?

Alex spent the following years working on crypto liquidity while trading, lending, and vault infrastructure matured. When a values-based investing platform he was working on failed to attract enough backing, he returned to the idea of building a Bridgewater of crypto. A public blockchain can make the rules visible. The design still determines who can move the assets and who can change those rules. Programmable vaults offered a way for investors to hold the units representing their interests while the manager traded within defined permissions.

His first plan was to build the infrastructure and let outside researchers supply investment signals. Researchers wanted capital behind their ideas. Investors wanted a strategy they could evaluate before committing money. Alex and a talented team spent about two years building the first strategies themselves and the platform to run them. OpenAlpha’s own strategies gave the platform a way to begin operating.

Strategy and custody

OpenAlpha starts with the decision to own Bitcoin or Ether. Its systematic strategies use forecasts to raise or hedge exposure, with the goal of growing the investor’s holdings relative to holding the asset after costs. Forecast errors, fees and leverage can increase losses.

Alex treats strategy and custody as parts of the same engineering problem. The strategy determines the exposure it wants. In OpenAlpha’s vault model, the vault holds the underlying assets and the manager trades within defined permissions. Investors hold Vault Units in their own wallets. The units evidence their legal interest and allow them to request redemption under the applicable terms.

Beyond the first strategies

The platform brings together research, trade execution, risk management, fund accounting and redemptions. The vault model separates each fund’s mandate and manager permissions from the investor’s ownership of the units.

Alex wants outside managers to bring their strategies to investors and independent researchers to contribute signals through the same infrastructure. His aim is to make it the infrastructure on which hedge funds operate.

Operating status and rollout

OpenAlpha operates SmartBTC with team-affiliated investor capital. The company is preparing the commercial beta for SmartBTC and SmartETH. Alex’s target for opening to eligible investors is 2027, subject to completed offering documents, eligibility reviews and operational readiness.

The company publishes its research methodology, including how it uses executed source trades to construct hypothetical risk-scaled results. The methodology sets out what the source trades show and which costs and settings are modeled.

The team

Alex leads the company and the investment work as founder, CEO and CIO.

Alex is looking for people who understand the work and want to shape the next phase, especially former colleagues at Bridgewater and trusted peers in his network. He welcomes candid questions about the strategy and ownership design and wants to work with people who can help build the company and share in the value they create.

Why financial access matters

Alex has worked on the decentralization of money for over 25 years. He wants more people to be able to use sophisticated financial tools without a few institutions deciding who gets access. OpenAlpha brings that work to systematic investing through a design in which investors hold their own units and delegate specified trading powers.