Codex and Glider: The Pricing Layer Behind Glider
Glider is a portfolio management platform on crypto rails, built for the next wave of onchain investors. Codex powers accurate, real-time pricing across every chain Glider supports, so the team can focus on building instead of pricing infrastructure.
Glider is building for a different kind of onchain user.
Glider is not for traders trying to move in and out of a token in seconds. Glider is building for investors who want to understand cost basis, manage portfolios, execute strategies, and hold assets over longer time horizons.
The goal is to make onchain finance feel less like Metamask and more like Public.com.
John Johnson, Glider's co-founder and CTO—JJ to most people—frames the thesis directly. People do not want to trade crypto. They want to trade real things, using crypto as the settlement layer underneath.
The numbers back him up. Stablecoins, RWAs (real-world assets), and prediction markets are the categories of crypto growing right now, while pure token speculation sits in a rougher spot. McKinsey estimates $2T+ of RWAs will be tokenized by 2030.
Glider's audience reflects that shift. A meaningful share of its users live in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, places where traditional brokerage access is limited or nonexistent.
"I was just talking to a contractor of ours in Iraq. He has zero access to the equities market. He wants this product so badly."
JJ's mental model for Glider is straightforward. Put Public.com and Glider side by side, and the only difference is that Glider runs on crypto rails. That requires every asset, on every chain, to be priced accurately in real time.
That is where Codex comes in.
"I can spin up a UI. I cannot spin up Codex.
Don't try to price all the assets on every chain ever. Just don't. I'll see you in three years, gray and impoverished."
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JJ,
Co-founder, Glider
JJ has watched the DeFi pricing problem expand for years.
He started using Codex in the early days of onchain aggregation, including during his time at 0x, when liquidity was beginning to fragment across venues.
At first, crypto pricing was relatively simple. A Uniswap v1 pool had ETH and another asset, the midpoint was the price, and a small set of assets mattered.
Then the market changed.
Aggregators, new DEXs, L2s, non-EVM chains, launchpads, wrapped tokens, staked assets, rebasing tokens, lending markets, tokenized equities, and long-tail assets all made "the price" harder to define.
There are now 80+ million assets across 100+ chains and countless combinations of liquidity sources.
"Pricing is the most important thing you give a customer. If you don't have a cardinal direction for what something is worth, you don't have security or trust with your users. And It's harder than people think."
That complexity is exactly why JJ refuses to build pricing in-house. He has had the build-versus-buy conversation with multiple engineering leaders who looked at the Codex line item and assumed pricing must be something they could solve over a weekend.
"I have literally had to defend Codex from amazing executives with fancy degrees. They come in and say, 'pricing is easy, I can do this.' Okay, sit down. Let's talk about what a price actually is."
His read on it is straightforward. Crypto is one of the last places a small team can build from a garage, but pricing infrastructure is not where to spend that advantage.
"Crypto is the last bastion of being able to start Apple in your garage. You just have to know what to build and what not to build.
I want to build product. Codex builds the pricing infrastructure."
– JJ, Co-founder, Glider
Glider is not the first product JJ has built on Codex.
He has brought Codex into every company and R&D project he has been part of since 0x, including the Matcha DEX aggregator, the Smol Studios product studio that worked with VCs like Paradigm, his ongoing R&D at Anagram, and Glider today.
"Codex is one of three things I install on every project I start. DeFi revolves around pricing. There's nothing that isn't priced, for better or worse."
When asked what makes Codex stick across so many different products, JJ keeps coming back to the same handful of things:
- Coverage that keeps up with the market. Every chain Glider's users want to trade on tends to already be supported, including the ones JJ assumes will be a problem.
- GraphQL flexibility. Every product projects data differently. Codex lets Glider ask for the fields it needs, shape responses around the UI, and avoid building internal data plumbing.
- Speed, uptime, and trust. Years in, performance is still the thing JJ is least worried about. It is consistent, high-trust, and the provider he has had the fewest problems with regarding accuracy, speed, and uptime.
- A team that ships at crypto speed. New metas arrive monthly. Prediction markets, RWAs, new chains, new launchpads. Codex tends to be on it before he asks. The recent launch of prediction market endpoints is the next thing on his integration list.
- Built for AI-assisted development. JJ's day-to-day workflow looks less like writing GraphQL queries and more like pointing agents at the docs. The schema-driven docs, MCP server, and Claude skill make that loop fast.
"I point my agents at your docs and let them go to town. I've internalized the API well enough that I can guide it, and the rest the agent handles."
The cumulative effect is that JJ's teams keep their attention on the product, not the data layer.
Glider can spend its time on the parts of portfolio management that nobody has solved yet, like asset taxonomies for RWAs, after-hours pricing for tokenized equities, and tax-aware execution.
Everything else comes off the shelf.
"If you told me I had to build a mobile trading app tomorrow, Codex is the first pick of my roster. Add an RPC, add a host, and the rest is up to you to build."
Glider gets to focus on the next category of onchain finance without first becoming a pricing infrastructure company.
They build products. Codex handles the pricing.