# The First RWA > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [528]. 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, 2025-07-03 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhnAZcsZ7nM. 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): History of the contracting layer. - Career works it belongs to: - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure, Ethereum's Success (2015): Talk at Devcon 1, the Ethereum developer conference in London, on why cypherpunk failed and Ethereum... (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: - 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) - Topics: Crypto history, e-gold & digital money (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Ian Grigg (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); contracts (5 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); smart contracts (2 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); Mattereum (1 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.11 (1.00 is the top), number 582 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [533] [What is Ethereum for? (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/533.md); [535] [What Assets are Actually Worth Tokenizing? (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/535.md); [536] [Decentralised Money Laundering (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/536.md) - On the same works, just after: [519] [The Entire Point of Crypto (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/519.md); [520] [The Radical Disruption of Crypto (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/520.md); [522] [Fiat Assets vs Self Sovereign Assets (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/522.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: The First RWA, video, 2025-07-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhnAZcsZ7nM; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [528], https://guptaoption.com/texts/528.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhnAZcsZ7nM&t=0s) Yeah. 1999 2000 uh Ian Grigg who is still active on the chain he's done a lot of work with a lot of different projects including Mattereum uh had a product called Digi Gold and Digold was uh basically Chom and digital cash. So you had a centralized node which was the bank and you could do transactions with somebody else. The bank would verify the transactions were valid, but the bank couldn't see who was paying who or how much they were paying. So, there was some cryptographic blinding in there. Uh, and the backing currency for that was a famous digital currency called e-old that was physical gold in vaults. And that was probably the first recorded instance of somebody issuing a digital token backed by a physical asset, Digold. Uh and there was a famous court case digold versus systemics and Ian has all the documents up in his website which was actually the first place where the validity of uh Ricardian contracts basically smart contracts governed by legal contracts. There was litigation and that was the first time that was tested in court and it held up in court and that's probably the the critical legal foundation for the vast majority of the work that's being done right now to bring contracts on smart contracts together. And Ian is still around. He's on Twitter. uh G_FC if I remember correctly. --- End of [528] The First RWA. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [519](https://guptaoption.com/texts/519.md) The Entire Point of Crypto (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.