# Gold-Backed Alternatives to Stablecoins > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [478]. 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, 2025-09-16 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9JUTDkaRRA. Text: automatic captions, mostly corrected - 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 foundations. - Career works it belongs to: - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (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) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (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) - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (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) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to 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: USDC (2 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); Ricardian contract (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); New York Convention (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); USDT (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); Ian Grigg (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Mattereum (2 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); smart contracts (1 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); contracts (1 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.12 (1.00 is the top), number 493 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [496] [Gold & Invisible Circular Dependencies (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/496.md); [499] [Ethereum: Safe for Everybody (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/499.md); [500] [Digitizing Commodities Markets (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/500.md) - On the same works, just after: [472] [American Innovation x British Precision (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/472.md); [473] [The UK Will Lose Web 3.0 Just Like It Lost Web 2.0 (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/473.md); [474] [Multi-Jurisdictional Lamination: Mattereum's Work (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/474.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: Gold-Backed Alternatives to Stablecoins, video, 2025-09-16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9JUTDkaRRA; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [478], https://guptaoption.com/texts/478.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9JUTDkaRRA&t=0s) So the um I mean the backbone work for this was done in believe it or not 1996 by an Australian by the name of Ian Grigg who is still active on the space. You can find him on Twitter_FC. And uh what Ian did was he figured out how to make smart contracts legally enforceable in 170 countries using the uh a mechanism called a Ricardian contract which basically takes existing international legal norms of a thing called the 1958 New York uh convention New York uh 1958 New York Convention on Foreign Arbits and that provides a kind of de facto global jurisdiction in which you can enforce contract and Ian figured out how to make a smart contract a contract under the oices of the 1958 convention. Mattereum builds directly on top of Ian's work and Ian was for a while our chief scientist and as a result you could take a smart contract that handles a physical thing and make that into an enforcable legal contract in 170 countries using the Mattereum system. So we do for a living. Um, and you know that as a framework fits perfectly with goldbacked currencies because you need legal enforcability of the gold. And you would like a goldbacked I don't even necessarily want to say currency, let's say a goldbacked medium of exchange. You would like a goldbacked medium of exchange to have physical reserves in dozens of countries so that if you want to take physical delivery of your gold, you could do it in the country that was nearest and most convenient to you. Uh, and I think that there is an enormous opportunity for the gold industry to get in on the game on crypto and produce a kind of goldbacked alternative to USDC and USDT that would have instead of a single kind of uh volatile issuer, it would be backed by the weight of the entire global gold system. All the LMBA refineries and there are either 50 or 70 of them around the world. uh all of the largecale vaulting infrastructure for people like Brinks, you know, these kind of mechanisms, international law, gold as a mechanism. I think that could really give USDC a run for its money. And I love to see anytime people are doing goldbacked crypto. --- End of [478] Gold-Backed Alternatives to Stablecoins. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [472](https://guptaoption.com/texts/472.md) American Innovation x British Precision (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.