# Breaking Down Real World Assets: Crypto Daily, with Mario Nawfal and Vinay Gupta (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [555], part 2 of 2. 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/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2024-08-07 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag. 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): Explains the contracting layer to a crypto audience.
- 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)
  - 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)
- Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (58%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: RWA (14 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); Mattereum (49 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); real estate (33 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated); tokenization (13 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); KYC (10 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Asset Passport (7 here; 33 sources in all, earliest dated 2017, 2 undated); expertise (10 here; 65 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); DigiGold (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); Digital Dispute Resolution Rules (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); global trade (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013)
- Importance: core-text score 0.27 (1.00 is the top), number 291 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- On the same works, just before: [558] [Event Spotlight - Talk at LOGIN 2024 - Can regulators... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/558.md); [557] [The Future of Real Estate RWA (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/557.md); [556] [ETHCC24: 'Selling physical things using NFTs: what we... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/556.md)
- On the same works, just after: [554] [RWA for Emerging Markets (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/554.md); [553] [Ethereum and Fraud (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/553.md); [552] [Dollars are RWAs (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/552.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: Breaking Down Real World Assets: Crypto Daily, with Mario Nawfal and Vinay Gupta, video, 2024-08-07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [555], https://guptaoption.com/texts/555.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=2250s) legitimate companies and getting exposure to the crypto industry through whatever mechanism look I don't I don't think there's anything wrong with that I am actually in favor of it as long as it's a reputable company with a reputable team doing real world business and not involving meme coins I don't want a kyc to meme coins I wouldn't mind kyc to an exchange to a company like Mattereum so I'm I'm for it this is something that I can tell my mom about pulse I'd love to be on the fly on thewall in that conversation too because most of my conversations never go well hey check out this new monkey jpeg I just bought mom so maybe I can bring bring Mattereum home to Mom uh if you guys don't have that in the merch store that's courtesy of David tenx look forward in the Mattereum merch store bring Mattereum home to Mom that's very warm I like that uh let's pivot right into the AMA because we already started off with a great question AK asked a great question and looking at the clock we're right about that time any so we're going to pretend for just a second like we hadn't already heard from V about some of the things they were doing but what I'd actually like to get is he touched on this a little bit in the beginning uh but first V can we get a little bit more uh about your background because you said you've been in the ethereum game a long time and you've actually been working working on tokenized things like gold since the 90s is that true well so in the late 90s I was paid for a year in uh cryptographically secured tokenized gold product uh so that there's a there was a project called e eold which was a gold back digital currency there was a cryptographic layer on top of that called digigold I took my salary in eold and I was quite close to the digigold team uh that's a guy called Ian Grigg who is still very active in the crypto space uh look for things like triple Anor accounting Grigg is a genius right like in a lot of ways Ian Grigg is the guy that you think Satoshi is um so you know my background in crypto I mean I I was first aware of public hey cryptography in probably '92 or 94 and helped write a pretty substantial cryptographic application in 97 uh after 911 I end up working for both us and UK military doing cryptographic applications research in different capacities worked on cyber security so you know like I had a lot of life experience doing crypto stuff both as an anarchist and also as a you know kind of Defense Contractor um but I also had an enormous amount of experience working in decentralized Energy Systems uh I've been working on climate change and disaster re hundreds of millions of climate refugees as an enduring problem

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=2400s) for 22 years at this point started that in 2002 so if you look there's lots of different areas in my life that kind of Bounce Around in fields that you think are not connected but to me those fields look connected right for me what do you do with Mattereum it's an aid transparency technology you put international Aid into the field a third of it goes missing how do you stop that digitally tag everything tokenize the supply chain watch every penny so none of it goes missing audit stuck directly on the chain what happens if somebody steals out of that well we've going to have all of our insurance products and all the rest of this kind of stuff okay great what about renewable energy well what if we did one nft per solar panel well then you could just buy solar panels as nfts and then you could get yield from those solar panels because they're your physical property I don't know whether that' be a security or not under us law but in a lot of jurisdictions it wouldn't be because it's a physical thing you own that you're basically ranting to a grid provider so this problem with a physical digital binding if you get that right it accelerates adoption of renewable energy it cleans up the aid industry and almost any area of life that you look at secure digital physical binding fixes super fundamental problems at global scale and that mindset you know I was writing papers on what you would Now call deepin in like 2009 there's a thing I wrote called the Global Village Development Bank that you can find I went into ethereum looking for this toolkit okay well they've got smart contract if I have Smart contracts and a bunch of XML files and some legal E I could turn that into decentralized energy I could turn that into cleaning up the aid industry all this stuff about real estate and gold and all the rest of that stuff that is Cash Cow stuff right gigantic and efficient industries that hugely need support on one side and on the other side whoever told you that a thing that rested on the dollar is called a stablecoin surely that is an inflation coin so in that you know a national debt coin so in that sort of context okay the the crypto world needs gold it needs hard assets it needs to dollarize because you're never going to have peace between the crypto world and the US government when the crypto world runs entirely on dollars right you know that that's like basically standing in Dracula's house and telling him that you're a vegetarian so in this kind of situation you know the the Deep solution for so many of the world's problems is that people are

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=2550s) lying to each other and they're just talking the blockchain should be the place that we purge that element out of the global economy and the difference that that's going to make to people's ordinary lives is going to be 10 or 20% of their money shows up again because it isn't being thieved out of the systems they use to stay alive so we had the conversation earlier about the real estate market and how much money almost trillions ions of dollars of money potentially flowing in just through the tokenization of real estate um are is that how you would say that rwas would unblock the next stage of eth appreciation is that what we're really waiting on is some sort of real estate rush so there are two actual games right and here I'm just gonna you know I don't normally say this in public but let's just do this thing I will now take the machete so basically to support $350 billion of ether you have to start thinking in terms of many many many trillions of dollars of assets being traded across that platform otherwise what is it that is supporting The Ether price and you think oh my God how could that possibly work where would you get that volume of assets two places and only two places category one real estate never been successfully traded electronically we didn't have the technology now we have blockchain we have ai we have ZK snarks we have all kinds of other bits and pieces of stuff you need like being able to do drone survey you fly a drone around a house that's how you do the condition report you have an AI look at the Drone footage and then writes a document describ in the house super doable there are probably 20 startups funded do that right now so we crack digital trade of real estate that's three trillion dollar of transactions a year imagine that's sufficient transactions $3 trillion of transactions um take 1% of that right 3 trillion 300 billion $ 30 billion $30 billion PA right that's a lot of money and that's the kind of money that it takes to sustain something like a $350 billion eer price um so think of that as you know structure one right actually it's not 3 trillion 300 yeah 30 million so structure two global trade we're talking here containers shipping in the UK they have passed a law called the uh UK electronic trade documents Act and that means instead of having paper documents describing what's inside of a

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=2700s) SE container you can use electronic documents the UK government says get this $280 billion dollar of savings a year possible from the digitization of trade because the existing systems go back to like the 17th century right so when you start talking about billions of real estate and UK government's estimate of $28 billion of savings on trade these are the kinds of things that make a multi-trillion dollar blockchain economy feasible right that's what it is for it's the global machinery for real estate and international trade oh that's what the blockchain is for man if we'd been explaining the blockchain that way for 10 years and we had kicked scammers out on their ears using a variety of you know legal and smart contract approaches I'll come back to the smart contract approaches for descaling the industry in a minute if we had built those things what do you think the ether price would be today right 37 right you know so much more the surgically clean version of things David what I like about this is this is like the uh surgically clean scrubbed in version of ethereum is what he's talking about where like even buying the token requires kyc and every bit of the money that flows in is flowing in for the right reasons it's not to say that what's been going on with memes and nfts and stuff isn't real or right there's no judgment to those things it's just to say that we we we haven't even understood the tools with which we've been given it's like we were early man discovering fire and we didn't even know we could cook food with it yet it's he is that right that right think of think of it this way right how long is it going to take Vitalik to teach the human race what Vitalik knows that's yes you're starting to make me feel like that that's why I was picturing it that way it's like maybe I've been thinking about this all wrong yeah right I mean Vitalik is a supernaturally insightful guy you know I knew Vitalik when he was 19 right and and 19 years old nobody should be that smart or that wise that is just ridiculous and everybody knew it it's like wow this this is something else right so if you think of it as just like gradually downloading layers of the Vitalik vision and making it real 2014 2015 the ethereum foundation Vision the thing inside of the team was real estate it was what you'd Now call refi it was

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=2850s) you know things like um uh you know airplane routing air traffic control tradable objects for air traffic routes all of these ideas but it was all physical trade it was all Change the World by cleaning up international trade that was kind of the core vision of what Ethereum was going to be used for I remember standing around looking at the first nft in some bar like wow crypto Kitty they put an image onto a smart contract wow i' never thought of that and it was a real object of curiosity we couldn't figure out what that was or what it was for but it was an amazing thing of like we've never seen that before and then 2018 arrived and what we got hit by was an invasion of multi-level marketing freaks right we just got hit by round after round after round of Ponzi skem scum who invaded the space and the space was mostly Engineers there was very little legal expertise there was very little real world expertise in dealing with crime and we got a whole bunch of people that looked at this beautiful thing that we had created kicked down the godamn doors and set up home and then because those people were so effective at communications five years later a lot of people thought that that was the real blockchain industry right it was not the real blockchain industry it was a perversion and an invasion of the original fishion which was fix World Trade so we don't have to live in this hell I'm having bitconnect flashbacks like you're you're sending me back to a time that I don't even think I belong in uh with that type of stuff this this could go so much deeper v i I'm going from question to question on this list because I could ask you more about what you just said but in the uh uh in the following of the AMA I'm trying to ask somebody mentioned earlier something called the Mattereum asset passport or map can you explain what that is yeah absolutely so you want to buy a house you got to answer three questions is and then I say a house it could be a painting it could be uh an airplane could be anything any piece of valuable property you answer three questions number one what is it right and what is it is a complicated question if I take an artifact like a used MRI machine or an x-ray machine figuring out that that works properly and it's correct up to spec and it's safe and I can sell it to a hospital and they can plug it in and use it and it's not going to give bad data that probably requires 20 different kinds of technical expertise to verify so the Mattereum asset passport is almost

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=3000s) like a miniature Dow every person with every kind of expertise is required to identify the object basically lodges an insurance or a warranty onto the object so you think of it as kind of like a folder and into that folder you place in the smart contract every single proof warranty Insurance document you know factual analysis whatever it is and nothing goes into that document that isn't tied to some kind recoverable stake it could be on train it could be an insurance policy it could be off train it could be physical assets you could stake a bunch of gold bars against it however is no information goes in there that isn't tied to stake so if there is defect in the information you can recover assets to cover the damage taken by the defect you as the buyer you got to look at all that information decide whether all the risks that you care about are covered you got to decide that the proof is good enough that the money is there to cover and then you do the transaction every single person that put information into that document gets paid when you buy the physical thing they all get paid for the warranties just like buying an extended warranty and Best Buy what that gives you is financial protection in the event of a defect but that process means that the people that are backing those warranty claims like for example an insurer might do they're going to be damn sure that thing is real because they don't want to have to pay out when the thing turns out to be fake right and that structure it works in 100 70 Juris uh but 169 countries 172 jurisdictions everywhere that thing called the New York convention on arbitration uh a 1958 International protocol for managing commercial dispute anywhere the 1958 convention applies the Mattereum asset passport is sound 170 countries practically speaking um furthermore you could have defi Insurance you could have trfi insurance you could have a mixture of insurance you could have tokenized risk pools for ordinary people put their token into a buck and it underwrites transactions they get income as a result all of those different ways of covering risk come together in the Mattereum Masset passport from the extremely rigid end of trfi to something that is incredibly decentralized and defi it all fits inside of the same abstraction because everything is represented as truth and money so we spent years looking uh and here I'm going to use some big words right the epistemology and the ontology of the represent ation how do you make a digital twin that actually works in

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=3150s) trade we have a freaking ontology Department right how you see a blockchain company with an ontology Department we've worldclass expertise in handling physical assets the guy that designed a lot of the asset passport stuff is the guy that used to take care of the British royal fames armor collection and he comes from a world where if something has ever been sold for money it's not considered to be valuable it's a commodity oh Strat of various vins yes they're very very beautiful but this armor hasn't been sold at 800 years it's a totally different world model at that level and that's the kind of expertise that went into designing this thing right our our head illegal is it a crack computer security analyst who then retrained as a lawyer and you know all of these kinds of models that Mattereum asset passport thing it is potentially as fundamental a breakthrough as the joint stock Corporation or so the invention of insurance itself because it gives us a universal way of identifying all of the world's assets and making them tradable the blockchain is how we implemented that but the actual fundamental breakthrough is something a little like the joint stock Corporation it's a fundamentally new way of arranging trade that's such an interesting way of thinking about stuff this is uh honestly uh a bit of a privilege to get to listen to some of this stuff because it's very refreshing uh to have something on this technical level I'm going to give one opportunity to everybody to raise your hand if you got a question I'm going to let David uh ask one more and then there might be time for one more uh before we hit that one hour mark and then wrap up and send everybody on their way so David if you've got anything and we'll see if anybody throws a hand up yeah absolutely pulse and I'm going to I'm going to switch it up this time and ask a more technical question rather than my typical where where can I get the tokens and how do I farm them where's the air drop and this and that I want to know something that I can actually recommend to to some of my family members because this is something I think traditional investors would really appreciate I'm curious on the the long-term Vision Vinay where in three years where is m Mattereum going to be where what what's where will the company be in terms of addressable market share like how big are you guys trying to get do you think Mattereum is something that is going to take over say maybe 10% or something significant of this entire industry uh that's very very small compared to our goals right I'm after 10% of global real estate actually I'm after 50% real estate um the Visa was founded by a guy called de Hawk uh dewk was a Visionary

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=3300s) Visa has founded so much early you think it's found in the 1950s uh I used to work with a charity that dewk funded called keric Commons and that was all of his knowledge about the Visa approach to governing Global Systems um and I worked with that thing for years uh during the pandemic I was looking around for inspiration I'm like why don't I just call dhawk and so I did right got a phone number talked to him we spent hours on the phone going over the ways in which I had constructed Mattereum on the Visa template Visa works for things that you can pay for with a credit card when you get to something which is too expensive to pay for with a credit card Visa stops working now that is not really what the Visa company should have done sometime in the 70s or 80s Visa should have figured out how to handle invoices and then it should have figured out how to handle real estate and if they'd done that there'd be no room for Mattereum there' probably be no room for the blockchain but Visa stayed in the consumer domain that left all the real estate transactions and all the business to business stuff being done basically by people emailing people PDF files right the whole world runs on email PDF files so what Haw and I basically figured out was that Mattereum was viable oh that takes the Visa principles it reapplies them to trade it uses new technology to come manage a bunch of the transaction costs no reason that shouldn't work um and you know if dhawk had lived longer and been a better chance that we would been able to announce Hawk as an advisor because he certainly gave us plenty of advice um likewise you know Sir Jeffrey Voss the guy that did the uh digital dispute resolution rules that we use um you know he explicitly says Luke the UK wants to terminate all of the blockchain transactions that need legal cover in the same way that we terminate all of the derivative contracts that need legal cover any derivative contract anywhere in the world if something blows up odds are that wherever that thing was issued it's going to get sorted out in the UK if something goes wrong gee maybe we should do that for the blockchain and in that document which I posted in the chart earlier on he's casually talking about $600 trillion do of derivatives get sorted out in the UK 600 million pounds of derivatives so the scope of this thing is UK government says well you know there's $280 billion of savings a year to get $28 billion of savings you have to move multiple trillion dollars of goods so we spent seven years

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=3450s) building the industrial architecture is scalable all asset classes all countries all transactions you can integrate AI you can integrate the existing insurance people you finally get the digitization of invoices and you get digital identities for physical things in the same way that we've got digital identities for insurance products and the last time that there was a major overhaul uh of sorry not Insurance products bonds Securities the last time that there was a major overhaul of these fundamental systems of trade was in the 1980s it was called Big Bang and that was when we stopped trading stocks and shares on paper electronic trading coming to stocks and shares was mid 1980s before that stock markets were literally physical rooms where people turned up in special clothing there was a kind of jacket that you wore if you were a Trader and the trading floor was people making these Strang looking hand signs to each other and people running backwards and forwards with paper notes recording the deals and then reconciling the paper and the trades would settle two or three days later when they digitized the stock market the current modern Financial system was born and then we stopped and we didn't really digitize anything else until we got to kind of like documents in the 1990s we got into music and movies in the early 2010s um and then it kind of sold out so my suggest question is we digitize the physical Logistics of container shipping and we digitize the real estate and by the time you digitize those things you've got tens of trillions of dollars of assets on chain and not the S black rock is talking about which is assets that already have digital identities like treasury bills here's a treasury bill he here's an IBM stock those things already have digital identities you move them from one digital system to another digital system maybe you change the marginal little the world will not change that's already digital what I'm talking about is sending an AI out to buy you a house and having it come back with options and knowing for sure that everything that it tells you is true because it's interpreting the Mattereum the Mattereum in a Mattereum asset passport what I'm talking about is being able to run Global optimization linear programming AI quantum computers take your pick run Global optimization over a fully digitized global trade Network how much waste is there in the global trade system food is 50% right manufacturing 20% 30% 40%

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=3600s) right now we don't have the data to use AI to clean up the global manufacturing system and take out all of the waste world's desperate for natural resources we jammed up against global warming nobody has enough money all of those problems the waste is one of the places where we can reduce the size of the global problem without disadvantaging anybody about how fight with them but what you need is a clean w of digitizing the world so that was what I you know left to do 2017 right I'm going to go figure that thing out and fortunately we were able to keep the company funded for years while we did the basic research and then we started doing a little bit of you know experimentation we worked with William Shatner from Star Trek we did some gold bars we did a bit of this and a bit of that and that was enough for us to kind of have confidence that it worked the most expensive thing we ever sold was a trumpet belonging to an Australian DJ called Timmy trumpet that went for 30 which at the time was $102,000 we've listed a $2 million piece of real estate but the critical thing is not the testing of the systems that we've done it's that the people that actually run the Global Financial system take us completely seriously if you look at the global you know the the UK um Juris setion task force digital dispute resolution rules Mattereum quoted on page four and we were parts of that process we ran the workshop in 2017 that was the real first point of contact between in the blockchain world in the UK Judiciary and I'll post a link to that in a minute so you know we went out there to totally fulfill the promise of ethereum that it was going to be the thing that changed the world for the better permanently we took that completely seriously and we went out and we built it I it's really cool that you're still carrying that Banner is so amazing uh and I'm I'm very fortunate I think all the listeners are very fortunate to be here this is one of those spaces man where we don't get a chance to do as much as we could uh only goes for an hour and every single speaker we had could have contributed more so I apologize that we just didn't get a chance to give you guys more of a chance each one of you uh and then V we could do this again so if you guys are ever in spaces make sure you're all inviting each other make sure you're following each other uh to get a chance to do these things again so I want to say thank you to everybody for coming out vet uh everybody make sure that you're following vet and Mattereum follow both of the accounts they've both been in here in the spaces uh because there was so much more to this and obviously this is somebody's brain you're going to want to pick if you get a chance and the same is for all the all the other speakers the people that accepted our invites for this space is each one like I said I only we only got like five minutes from each of you and still I

[1:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_KLWVCag&t=3750s) could go on for an hour guys so thank you so much for coming in and thank you to the listeners for filling up the comments section which I was scrolling through there's great stuff in there uh we're going to pack it up for the day uh and I want to say how much I appreciate you guys for allowing me and David to be here again thank you to Mario and the team and then David I know you've had a hell of a day up here rocking spaces man we got to get you rehydrated uh for one or two more goes David needs your support guys if you're following David follow him to the next show and go cheer him on David I've had a great time with you today man I'm proud of you you're an absolute beast and I'll see you next time absolutely pulse this one was great I love a refreshing rwa space in between a few meme coin degeneracy ones nothing like it and I want to thank all the listeners for coming out all of the speakers for coming up VIN Mattereum for doing everything you guys are doing we will see you at the next marioa fall in the round table spaces I hope everybody has a great day

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End of [555] Breaking Down Real World Assets: Crypto Daily, with Mario Nawfal and Vinay Gupta, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [554](https://guptaoption.com/texts/554.md) RWA for Emerging Markets (2024); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.