# Equity on the Blockchain > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [412]. 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, 2026-04-14 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnQyCkC5AR8. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step. - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Contracting-layer detail. - 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) - Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (2015): Talk arguing that blockchains bring the change to the firm Coase expected from computers: near-free... (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: Gold, stablecoins & asset backing (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: self-custody (9 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2022) - Importance: core-text score 0.11 (1.00 is the top), number 578 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [425] [Blockchain Isn't Weird (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/425.md); [427] ['Code Is Law' vs The Nation State (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/427.md); [429] [The Great Leap Forwards (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/429.md) - On the same works, just after: [682] [Ep. #641 - Vinay Gupta on China, Futurism, Government,... (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/682.md); [839] [Ethereum and Mattereum: launching Ethereum, then... (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/839.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: Equity on the Blockchain, video, 2026-04-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnQyCkC5AR8; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [412], https://guptaoption.com/texts/412.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnQyCkC5AR8&t=0s) If you put equity under the normal regimes for managing equity on the blockchain, it's just a database. You cannot self-custody equity. And I'm going to say that one more time just so everybody is real clear about this. You cannot self-custody equity. And you know, there are there are massive reasons and ramifications and complexity present why you cannot self-custody equity. You cannot self-custody equity. And if you make that as a split, you know, some assets you can self-custody, other assets you can't self-custody, then there's another split right beside that. Some assets you could self-custody and you can run over things like ZK, other assets you could self-custody but you can't run on over ZK because if they've been through a mixer, nobody will accept them on the other side of that. And this notion of a kind of stratification of the assets depending on issues like self-custody and mixers, I think that's the right way to think about this merging of all these different worlds. You're going to probably wind up with a single integrated set of technologies that will enable you to dominate or anything, but then on top of that there'll be a policy where that says I'm very sorry, you cannot put this token in that place. That's just not the way how that token works. --- End of [412] Equity on the Blockchain. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [682](https://guptaoption.com/texts/682.md) Ep. #641 - Vinay Gupta on China, Futurism, Government,... (2026); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.