# Blockchain Standardization and Interoperability > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [548]. 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, 2024-09-20 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Z1KTGTfrw. 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): Standards strategy for the ledger layer. - Career works it belongs to: - 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) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale. (suggested by machine) - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (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: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (50%); Cryptography, encryption & cypherpunks (50%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: IETF (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); standards (4 here; 87 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); global governance (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); platforms (1 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008) - Importance: core-text score 0.12 (1.00 is the top), number 494 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [551] [The Money Is The Smallest Aspect Of This Beast (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/551.md); [550] [Domain Names and Real World Assets (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/550.md); [549] [Bearer Assets and Synthetic Jurisdictions (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/549.md) - On the same works, just after: [546] [Marrying the Real and the Cryptographic world together (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/546.md); [539] [Crypto and the Federal Government (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/539.md); [540] [Real Estate Tokenization (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/540.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: Blockchain Standardization and Interoperability, video, 2024-09-20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Z1KTGTfrw; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [548], https://guptaoption.com/texts/548.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Z1KTGTfrw&t=0s) we have been through this thing before right 30 years ago uh the topic of w Gardens was big right compus serve AOL uh bullet board systems like the well there were all these large communities some of which were structurally really important you know like compus serve was pretty much where journalism happened the well was the entire West Coast Tech ecosystem you know Kevin Kelly Stuart brand all that set over there um all those things started out not interoperable you know they grew out bulletin board systems in the 1980s where you literally phoned in to send messages uh and then gradually these things kind of got merged into the internet and everything became interoperable and you sort of wound up with the modern equilibrium we have now forming over about 10 years but at the time it was not obvious that that was going to happen right people fought really hard for those standardization processes and It produced a lot set of things like internet engineering task force ITF uh which is the thing that makes the internet as we know it possible Right all that kind of '90s era even late 80s era standardization Machinery that was built those were the international platforms that allowed us to build an interoperable internet rather than having a bunch of you know completely separate systems with gateways and bridges between them right the fact that we don't have an internet where every message has to be you know technically translated and R-rated between different standards when you send a message the fact that we got this system where everybody's using the same stuff rather than gateways and bridges and translation layers and all the rest of that kind of stuff uh that was a multi-year political effort probably a multi- deade political effort that is still running right I ITF still exists uh I'm in the process of writing a policy paper right now uh to try and help do a little terraforming of the political Shenanigans in America around the blockchain now that we've finally come to the you know attention of elected politicians you know we're going to take a serious kick here unless we get our game together politically and um you know a lot of what I'm trying to point out in that paper is that the reason blockchain is such a mess and it is a horrible mess technically is that we never built Bridges to ietf if if Bitcoin had become part of the internet engineering Task Force if ethereum had become part of the internet engineering Task Force if all the l2s were in the same standards Machinery that the mainstream internet is in and we were hashing all of the out stuff out with [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Z1KTGTfrw&t=150s) ETF support we would probably be 5 years ahead of our current position right you know we're working all this stuff out from scratch and it's completely pointless because we're already in a society that was built by successful technical standards bodies which have machineries and processes and coordination mechanisms that are proven to work for People Like Us solving problems like these and I think that the reinvention of all of that stuff outside of the ITF is one of the worst political mistakes that we've made in the space because as we get into the part where we have to really seriously negotiate with government um having the broad-based engagement that something like ietf gives us um basically makes us into legitimate players in the global governance game rather than being kind of offshore pirate weirdos which is unfortunately the brand that we've inherited from 15 years ago um so I think of this standardization game like yeah we could set up our own standards bodies but I think that that is a structural error and what we should doing is we should be negotiating with ETF and getting those doors open uh because if we could get ITF to accept responsibility for blockchains and blockchain standardization I think the amount of political support that we'll get from that as a result is incalculable uh and you know if anybody has opinions on that I am in the process of writing some of the policy paperwork necessary to start those conversations going uh and I'm talking to some of the folks from Center for people centered internet that are in the right kind of circles of the right kind of language --- End of [548] Blockchain Standardization and Interoperability. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [546](https://guptaoption.com/texts/546.md) Marrying the Real and the Cryptographic world together (2024); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.