Johann Gevers is an entrepreneur building infrastructure for a free and prosperous society. He founded Crypto Valley, the world’s leading cryptofinance ecosystem, along with Monetas, the Tezos Foundation and the Crypto Valley Association.
Born in South Africa and based in Switzerland, he set up Monetas in Zug in 2012 to bring cheap financial and legal transactions to people without bank accounts, aiming the product at the parts of the world where the nearest bank branch is a day’s travel away. From 2013 he built out Crypto Valley around it, coining the name and organising the cluster of companies, lawyers and regulators that turned one canton into a place where work on decentralised systems could be done in the open. More than a thousand firms now operate there.
He also co-founded the Bitcoin Association Switzerland and the Digital Finance Compliance Association, and served as president of the Tezos Foundation.
The thread running through the work is jurisdictional. Crypto Valley grew because a small canton chose clear rules earlier than its neighbours, which is the mechanism the Free Cities movement is interested in: places compete for people and capital through the quality of their institutions, and good rules spread by being copied rather than imposed.
VideoLiberty in Our Lifetime 2021