# Decentralised Money Laundering > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [536]. 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, 2025-06-24 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdBNpBLu0TI. 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): Security risk for the ledger layer. - 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) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (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) - 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) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: North Korea (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); money laundering (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); AML (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); KYC (1 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2015) - Importance: core-text score 0.11 (1.00 is the top), number 530 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [542] [TradFi, DeFi: Fi (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/542.md); [543] [Risk and Insurance in Real World Assets (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/543.md); [544] [USDC: Good Deal For Consumers? (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/544.md) - On the same works, just after: [525] [The Future of Finance Markets in the Blockchain and AI Era (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/525.md); [528] [The First RWA (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/528.md); [519] [The Entire Point of Crypto (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/519.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: Decentralised Money Laundering, video, 2025-06-24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdBNpBLu0TI; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [536], https://guptaoption.com/texts/536.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdBNpBLu0TI&t=0s) You know if we think about decentralized uh PLC stock right if IBM stock IBM is not a decentralized thing it's a corporation it's registered in a specific uh jurisdiction it's got a board of directors shareholders there's a whole machine there so the thing the underlying asset is singular there is just one IBM contrast that to for example a gold token which might in principle be redeemable against 500 different vaults in 170 different countries and you could just turn up at any one of those vaults, hand over your token and receive a bar. So, you know, some of these assets are inherently very centralized, some of these assets are potentially decentralized, some of these assets are somewhere in the middle. But I think what it all boils down to when all is said and done is is a single legal entity responsible for the asset, right? the IBM board are responsible for the IBM shares kind of full stop and there's nothing past that. So I think it'd be helpful to think about this in terms of there are decentralized and centralized assets and then once those assets are kind of in the ecosystem you've got centralized or decentralized claims on those assets and you know decentralized claims on a centralized asset is a very different thing from decentralized claims on a decentralized asset. Um and you know the KYC, AML, CTF, Malarkey, um you know in the long run really this is all zero knowledge proof territory, right? I verify my identity. Okay, great. You've verified your identity. Now I can go and do transactions, you know, masked by snarks and all the rest of this stuff. And at the end of the process, if somebody decides that I'm a terrorist and wants to go get those files, there is some mechanism for unpicking that data. And you know those kinds of operations are highly tractable now that we have these kinds of technologies. Um but I sort of feel like you know a fundamental solution here has to come from trying to figure out what it is that we're attempting to achieve and what it is we're attempting to protect. And I think that the money laundering question is um illbehaved because of things like the mixers. You know, the same technologies that maybe give you transactional privacy, but with still the possibility of regulatory oversight are also very tightly coupled to the technologies that [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdBNpBLu0TI&t=150s) could just scramble money and there's absolutely no way to ever trace it ever again. And this in a context where North Korea just walks off with a billion and a half dollars. Um, which is, you know, that's a geopolitically significant amount of money when you're dealing with a regime that is trying to buy the necessary materials for a nuclear bomb. So, you know, all of this stuff, it doesn't really matter until it does, but when it does, you're really going to feel it. --- End of [536] Decentralised Money Laundering. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [525](https://guptaoption.com/texts/525.md) The Future of Finance Markets in the Blockchain and AI Era (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.