Alex Gordon-Brander’s work in electronic markets, systematic investing, regenerative finance and AI research. He graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge, with a joint MA in Mathematics and Law.
Current role
Alex leads OpenAlpha, a fully non-custodial systematic hedge fund platform for crypto. Its first strategies are SmartBTC and SmartETH. Alex’s aim is for outside managers to run their strategies on the same infrastructure.
As of 11 November 2026, SmartBTC operates with team-affiliated capital. Commercial beta for SmartBTC and SmartETH is in preparation.
Product design
In OpenAlpha’s vault model, investors hold Vault Units in their own wallets and use them to request redemption on-chain. The vault holds the underlying assets, and the manager trades within defined permissions. Investor rights and controls follow the Series terms and the verified vault deployment.
Research
The company publishes research against the benchmark of holding the underlying asset. One analysis starts from executed BTC and ETH trades and retrospectively scales them to target active risk. The displayed returns at those settings are hypothetical. OpenAlpha’s methodology describes the assumptions, costs and differences from the current product.
Filed 2003
Granted 2009
Alex helped develop electronic bond-trading workflows. He is one of four inventors named on U.S. patent 7,499,883 for electronic inquiry lists for financial products. MarketAxess is the original assignee. A continuation of the same patent family was granted in 2012.
Before 2010
Alex worked in Japanese bonds and structured-finance analytics, drafted an environmental business strategy for Standard & Poor’s, and consulted for JPMorgan.
Five-year tenure
2010s
Alex managed portfolio construction applications. He specified Bridgewater’s FX trading platform and helped implement it. He later rotated through foreign-exchange research and client services and qualified as an investment associate.
2017–2019
Alex joined ConsenSys early and co-founded Omega One. He and Alan Keegan co-authored a paper in 2017 on aggregating liquidity across digital-asset exchanges and using a balance sheet to manage counterparty exposure. The 2017 programme and early white paper list Alex as CTO. ConsenSys’s 2018 announcement names him as CEO.
Omega One signed a memorandum with Bermuda’s government in 2018 and announced the launch of Omega Dark in March 2019. Its six-month Class M licence expired in September. In October the company reported testing with an initial group of clients as it prepared a full-licence application. By 2022, Bermuda reporting recorded that its Hamilton office had closed.
2021–2022
Public record
Alex co-founded CoDEX Financial Network and served as its chief evangelist. The project focused on decentralized liquidity. He presented CoDEX at CoinAgenda Caribbean in 2021 and discussed its approach to liquidity and access in a 2022 Davos interview.
Alex’s work on financing forest regeneration builds on earlier work in renewable energy, wastewater treatment and climate strategy.
2024 · Pilot update
The Kwiakah First Nation co-founded Kwaxala with the operating team, including Alex. Chief Steven Dick leads the Nation and chairs Kwaxala. Alex serves as Director of Regenerative Finance & Tokenization, working on how to bring in outside capital while Indigenous partners retain majority ownership and direct stewardship.
The aim is to make forest regeneration pay for itself from the value living forests generate. In May 2024, Kwaxala identified the Nation’s forest management area as the starting point for its pilot and said it was developing the financing mechanism.
2008–2009 founding work
2014 pilot report
Alex helped found Algae Systems in 2008–2009 and served as its first CFO. The team later built a pilot with Daphne Utilities that grew algae using municipal wastewater and converted biomass into biocrude.
2010 programme
Alex presented a proposal for a currency tied to renewable-energy credits at the Future of Money summit. In a later interview he described how that work informed his interest in programmable money.
2021 · COP26
As Teratree’s CEO, Alex took part in a climate innovation forum at COP26. Teratree explored how to make large-scale regenerative planting economically viable.
2021 · Advisory group
Alex served on the Communications Impact Advisory Group for Resilience Frontiers, a UNFCCC initiative. The group advised on how communications and behavioral tools could support long-term climate resilience.
2026 · Research
Alex and Lucian St Aubyn co-founded Tulku, an independent research project on how artificial minds form values and choose to care. Alex draws on contemplative practice in his work on the founding thesis and research direction. The programme proposes comparisons of how models respond to feedback, make choices and offer practical help.
2023–2024
Alex was interim CEO of VRx Health during the February 2024 launch of XAIA, a spatial AI companion for mental health support on Apple Vision Pro. The company licensed XAIA from Cedars-Sinai.
The Cedars-Sinai team published a 14-participant feasibility study in npj Digital Medicine, a peer-reviewed Nature Portfolio journal. The researchers identified it as the first study of mental health therapy using generative AI in immersive virtual reality. The study examined acceptability and perceived safety.