# Mattereum - Decentralized Digital Twins > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [258]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2019-04-28 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Naming of the contracting layer's object records. - Career works it belongs to: - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine) - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine) - CoinDesk (2020): CoinDesk interview on an identity layer for physical things. (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine) - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Information markets — universal registers and digital twins (78%); Smart contracts, arbitration & dispute resolution — the legal layer (11%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: digital twin (29 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); Asset Passport (6 here; 33 sources in all, earliest dated 2017, 2 undated); smart property (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Hexayurt Capital (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Mattereum (5 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); supply chain (2 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); supply chains (1 here; 59 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); communications (1 here; 81 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 5 undated); contracts (1 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.29 (1.00 is the top), number 264 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md): close in content (cosine 0.92) - [565] [Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md): close in content (cosine 0.91) - On the same works, just before: [598] [Mattereum Smart Property Register - David Salgado (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/598.md); [716] [How do we control the material world with smart... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/716.md); [43] [William Shatner Authentication - Mattereum (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/43.md) - On the same works, just after: [197] [PRESS RELEASE: WILLIAM SHATNER TEAMS UP WITH LONDON FIRM... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/197.md); [163] [Tell Me Who You Are. Identity, institutional memory, and... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/163.md); [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: Mattereum - Decentralized Digital Twins, video, 2019-04-28, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [258], https://guptaoption.com/texts/258.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=0s) so I wanted to talk a bit about a change in the terminology nomenclature that we're using to discuss Mattereum which is we're gonna start using this term digital twin more and digital twin has been around as a term ten or fifteen years apparently in academia hasn't been widely used in industry there's been a lot debate about what it means what it should mean how people should use it and a lot of this goes back to the original thinking around hexayurt capital which is where we had lots and lots and lots of discussions with people can around table format dinner parties and trying to talk about the new technology between lots of different fields lots of different disciplines so that we could get to evolving new language because when you encounter genuinely new technology this is the thing that's your brand talks about says that and one of the ways you know that technological innovation is happening is that there's new norm and culture people are using new words to describe things that they haven't seen before so we've been using these terms like asset passport and we've been talking about smart property we've been kind of casting around for way of describing exactly how we think this blockchain digital interface is gonna work properly and what we've seen in the last less than a year six months is that the industry seems to be settling on the term digital twin to mean roughly the kind of thing that we're talking about our version of the digital twins story because it goes through all the asset passport and stuff it is actually much more kind of legal right it's like the the legal rights associated with the physical object of what we represent with highest fidelity other people that are doing things like engineering model and are you know using the digital twin to mean something which is much more like finite element analysis this kind of stuff but we are you know kind of in a position where we're looking at the terminology shifting and the blockchain people that were most interested in talking with people that are doing supply chain management the people that are doing sort of our armored artifact this kind of stuff and all of that stuff seems to be beginning to converge on use of digital twin as sort of the industry standard term for discussing this stuff so given that we seem to be headed in that direction yeah this is one of those things where you know the terminology has come to meet us it could have been the blockchain space would have come come up with its own term it might be that it was some other term than digital twin that we'd have come across and become the sounder term looks like digital twin is what people are using so we are gonna be sort of retooling the [2:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=140s) Mattereum communications stuff around the concept of digital twin doesn't change what happens at all Digital Twins have asset passports it's a really simple thing it's just that this blockchain of representation of reality we're gonna watch the digital trend Herrmann or jail to you onto that we use that as much as possible hopefully that will bring us into a little more convergence with the rest of the industry is going because we've been out here kind of on a limb for quite a long time you know when we started Mattereum the idea was that you were going to need you know really high fidelity legal interfaces between the physical and the digital seemed extremely remote that nobody was talking about security tokens nobody was talking about asset digitization in any kind of direct way there was some notion that smaller contracts could control the real world in some way there was a bunch of discussion about using automated systems to do that but what we didn't have was a kind of rich dance legal dialogue with all the people that were attempting to move in that direction because there weren't any we were really really far ahead of our time we're now at the point where we are just about ready to ship some product with all these things the deals tent built complicated there are many moving parts because you've got the physical people that we go people digital people the money people there's some line up but I think that in me you are gonna see some quite impressive starting points maybe I mean you're gonna see something at me whether you're impressed or not is up to you but we think it's impressive and you know then what comes out with that is this you know kind of the the long straight push up the road you know we've established the vehicle we've got the thing on the rails it's then basically just a question pushing it forward industry by industry asset class by asset class build the wheel adapters cross jurisdictional lines when we have to build their doctors in each jurisdiction it becomes I don't want to say straight forwards but we're definitely at the end of the R&D phase I think the Reid I don't want to say we brought I mean it's still Mattereum I think the recasting of the story around the digital twin narrative I think there's gonna be a big part of making that work legible to people you know right now we say asset passport you know if we do use digital 20 year ago very well discussion of digital twins just a few people in the blockchain space using it but two events have been to recently The Odyssey hackathorn what used to be Dutch chain 1700 people 1500 people lots of use of [4:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=290s) the digital terminology nobody blinked that I word everybody got used to the term everybody knew roughly what it man everybody can had their own story in their head about what digital twin was so we crossed the threshold where digital trend was a foreign concept had to be explained to the point where people use digital twin like you use web surfer they had nailed down that it had meaning same thing when I was out the blockchain global event all of those folks were totally comfortable with the terminology Digital twin so we just connect about terminology we explain what we're doing in that context and you know it just works right I mean this this should be the way that everything ties together I guess there are two other bits you want to talk about before I wrap up so the other thing I want to [5:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=340s) talk about a little bit is figure and ground so if we take an object here is a convenient bottle of printer ink for this fine print over here that working on this afternoon um so you know that object is identified by a barcode it gives it an identity as one of a class of assets it is a bottle of black ink the other barcode on them this individual bottle and it's kind of half full condition that doesn't have any legal identity beyond the names bottle half full printer ik so we're all familiar with that way of thinking about objects barcodes plus we lose personal identifiers things returns had a warehousing systems might have been divided and fires cheeky barcodes all the rest of them but common properties can float around in this anonymous condition so as we go through this process of you know here's the digital representation of this piece of chrome property just gonna make my digital twin right now so yeah you can see that they're 50% full right there's our bottle printer ink here's our digital twin 50% full we've got something to that how's the ownership now the crudest possible form of digital twin right this is not fundamentally rocket surgery Veni is what what printer ink is 50 percent fool you identified by its product code where identified by its condition I vote for the fact it's 50% full there's a digital trail the only reason that that has any kind of enormous transformative power is when you put it in the context of a blockchain so now anybody the ones who access that object can see that I've made an objective statement vouch my reputation or my wallet against the fact that this thing's 50% full you know there's a real clear direct story here of now we can just move this thing around and you know if you become the legal owner of this thing you know this thing is now nicely cool identified I have to give it to our lab all of those models what we've found is that a lot of people think the blockchain does this already the the legal interfaces for you know building these things aren't moving [8:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=490s) them around actually don't exist there's almost no real support infrastructure for the legal management of digital twins as you transfer ownership of them across say digital you know different digital systems across a blockchain across different jurisdictions and if you just move them inside of even a single supply chain there a legal end of that stuff people are still relying on very very standard combat force we're getting things done and the problem with that is the cost of litigation or anything that involves blockchains will be enormous because nobody understands what watching does so it's very very very difficult for people to you know resolve that in a court case you have expert witnesses you've got judges that don't necessarily understand what's happening until they're taught how it works the whole thing looks like a total tar [8:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=531s) pit and a lot of the reluctance to put these blockchain prototypes into production is that we go tar pit and once you've got valve Eagle tar pit you know safely paved over you know then it becomes possible to take a lot of these ideas put them directly into the real world and I think that we are pretty damn close to that I mean it is not being easy to get here right the legal complexities that we have to cross to be able to get into position we're transferring the you know signatory on the digital twin on a blockchain is recognized fluidly inside of legal system as a transfer of property building the legal machinery it do that you know without massively rewriting legislation this has not been an easy process right I mean you know we've been hard at work on this thing but once you get there you know that immediate fluidity right you move this around if this will follow it and that's what you were paying for you know that's gonna open a lot of doors a lot will happen I think that it is clear that swatting that narrative into the digital to an Alexa comm so many people are now speaking digit win if we're now basically explaining this in terms of you know it's a legal transfer rail so that when you train CH the digital ownership their key signing on the digital twin the legal transfer of the property occurs at the same time that's a pretty easy saw retail inside the digital twin narrative so I kind of feel like this was a big missing piece of the Mattereum puzzle that we've been sort of struggling with this problem with how to explain it and how to get it across the people but know that the wider narrative on distributed Ledger's has caught up and we're now in a position where we can say okay well digital twin right legal machinery from moving around digital twins it all kind of hangs together because so much of the building of these you know reporting things you know if we describe this as an asset passport as a passport whereas if we say you know okay you've got your digital twin the digital twin has a sort of legal addendum to it which is the asset passport which is the thing that makes it legally transferable you need an aspirin yeah you need a physical sports travel government-issued passport to travel so if your digital twin wants to head out on the road and become transferred between companies between individuals across jurisdictions your digital 2010 asset passport right if the digital twin is going to be you know taking the physical thing with it in its [11:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=681s) travels the solution that you didn't ask the passport through that actually kind of makes a lot of sense and I think that [11:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=690s) it's about all I have to say to talk about oh yeah so the other thing that I mentioned I started a few minutes ago talking my figure and ground so if you think of the ledger right yeah you know here we have a MOOC right inside this thing we can written down everything that we're gonna do I was actually handling a ledger for violins recently and one of the people who were working with in the violin project I'm sure there's a hundred and ten hundred twenty year old ledger with entry after entry after entry after entry after entry describing the condition of violins as they were traded eccentric oh absolutely amazing so we have this lantern the typical we're modeling these kinds of things is that the entries in the ledger were essentially the digital twin of the physical objects that were in the warehouse it was a pretty straightforward thing Andrian ledger digital twin no muss no fuss no messing around that was how it worked that was the paper goes on with the digital Twitter once you start networking all of the Ledger's there is just you know the blockchain and that's the universal ledger that everything's connected to at that point these things are still entries on the blockchain in a sense each one of this is like a row in a database it's just it's a smart contract from the theory up and being a ruin an SQL database where ICP Davis it's got that linkage so that causes a little confusion and people think that the digital twin is in some way a different thing from a ledger entry but tal intents and purposes digital twins are just very high-rez ledger entries this I think is something where there's a little bit of narrative drift because apparently the sort of real digital trend story starts with NASA and the NASA model with the digital twin was that it was a physical a digital simulator the flight simulator of exactly how an engineering subsystem would work on site of a spacecraft so when you start thinking the digital twin as being something which is kind of somewhere between the original NASA digital pen model and a warehouse entry on something like s8p then you've got some looked in it we're still in a position for that terminology is gonna need hashed out right we're gonna find over the next few years you know digital trends asset passports kind of at one end the people are doing numerical multiple on the other the people are building into ERP systems or third representation and the people are thinking and supply chains might have another way of seeing it but it's all within this kind of semantic cluster where digital twin with the following attributes you're still starting the conversation up here rather than starting different somewhere down there so yeah that was what I had to say about [14:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHbFhmSV_0&t=840s) digital twins it took us a while to make a decision that we were gonna start using that normal culture because it wasn't clear to us say it was a good precise enough description that we could work with it for all the things we wanted to do but one thing and another I think we've gotta think about it we've come to a conclusion so material is the company that produces decentralized digital twins that's right we say just head tries to children's digital friends on the decentralized network chocolate a decentralized adult rights --- End of [258] Mattereum - Decentralized Digital Twins. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [197](https://guptaoption.com/texts/197.md) PRESS RELEASE: WILLIAM SHATNER TEAMS UP WITH LONDON FIRM... (2019); the most closely related, [678](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md) WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.