Co-founder and chief evangelist officer for Codex Alex Gordon-Brander spoke to Cointelegraph about his Bitcoin story, the real-world use cases for crypto and the economic downturn during a World Economic Forum interview in Davos, Switzerland.
Standing curbside in front of Davos’ “Crypto House” at dusk, where Gordon-Brander had just finished demonstrating Codex’s capabilities during a crypto panel, the co-founder shared an upbeat outlook on crypto.
A long-serving crypto enthusiast and trad-fi veteran, Gordon-Brander, told Cointelegraph he was exploring digital and energy-backed currencies prior to discovering Bitcoin . He researched a “distributed currency based on renewable energy credits and governments,” but he concedes it was “super complicated.”
Around the time, a friend shared a Bitcoin idea with Gordon-Brander, but like most people that first hear about Bitcoin — especially so early on — Gordon-Brander thought it’s “probably not going to work.”
He tried to get hold of some satoshis, but his employer at the time, Bridgewater Associates — founded by former Bitcoin basher turned Bitcoin bull Ray Dalio — “couldn’t handle the compliance.” Fast forward to 2015, the year the Ethereum network launched, and Gordon-Brander realized that the cryptocurrency space had legs.
“I’d been really intrigued by Bitcoin but the idea of a programmable currency — the idea of a world computer and an interoperable financial system — blew me away,” he said.
From 2015 onwards, Gordon-Brander assisted in the launch of a crypto exchange and participated in the initial coin offering boom before joining Codex Labs.
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Although interest among investors in decentralized applications (DApps) is swelling such as those keen to acquire their first Ether , there is still “a lot of Bitcoin first” interest from institutions. Finally, while the bear market price action drags on, there is hope for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies:
“As a secular trend bet, digital assets still make a lot of sense.”
Ultimately, Gordon-Brander explains that there has been an awakening regarding crypto finance and the role it can play in solving real-world problems, from “ordinary people realizing that their money in the bank was no longer safe if their government doesn’t like their politics,” to tackling climate change:
“The world is in a much better place with this technology than it would be without it.”
His former boss at Bridgewater, Ray Dalio, now recommends a small allocation to Bitcoin and the optimism that crypto brought to the WEF was hard to ignore.
