# Gold RWA arrive onchain! (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [559], part 1 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, 2024-06-04 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU. 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 products.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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...
  - 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)
  - 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:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - 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)
- Topics: Gold, stablecoins & asset backing (39%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (33%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Mattereum (54 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); USDC (10 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); NFT (17 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); Swarm (9 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); real world assets (8 here; 24 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); real estate (24 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated); stablecoins (7 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Asset Passport (7 here; 33 sources in all, earliest dated 2017, 2 undated); USDT (4 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); global trade (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): delivery orders
- Importance: core-text score 0.30 (1.00 is the top), number 247 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [557] [The Future of Real Estate RWA (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/557.md): same career work: Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment
  - [167] [Global real estate rail (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/167.md): same career work: Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment
- On the same works, just before: [661] [RWA on Ethereum mainnet and L2 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/661.md); [561] [How the Blockchain can liberate producers and consumers. (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/561.md); [560] [Roger's Diffusion Curve: A Roadmap for the Ethereum Launch (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/560.md)
- On the same works, just after: [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)

## 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 RWA arrive onchain!, video, 2024-06-04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [559], https://guptaoption.com/texts/559.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=0s) if you can't buy a house using Bitcoin without turning the Bitcoin back into Fiat first and you've only got the payment going and there's no sort of digital deed that comes back what exactly is crypto accomplishing in that instance and the answer is zero we talk about specifically in the crypto space to rotate out of your crypto Holdings but I think the broader audience the people who want to buy goal what Mattereum is trading is a trustworthy pipeline which to do that all right thank you for joining us for the uh future of stuff 2.0 podcast we're coming to you in video and audio this time around and I'm thrilled to have with me the found and CEO of Mattereum Vinay Gupta calling in from London and we also have Kalam Mali the director of Mattereum gmbh who is tuning in from Berlin before we get started a quick round of introductions I am Prine Babu I run marketing uh with a team here at Mattereum and I'm going to be handing over the mic to Vin to give us a brief introduction into his background there's so much to talk about but we'll keep unpacking this as we go along Vin over to you sure so I was the release coordinator for ethereum in 2014 2015 did a lot of the project management of the LA the early comms and have a background in cryptographic applications development both civilian and Military going back to 1997 that's pretty cool and colab would love to learn about yeah I'm a director at Mattereum Germany and I've known VI since pre- Bitcoin days and and joined the the company in a new role to to overse the Token operation my background is is a mixed bag of things I started out in finance working on on high-tech Investments across all all fast growth areas and then fell into startup land in investments in in early stage companies and starting my own accelerators and then going into corporate venture and

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=150s) corporate finance working in in music Technologies and then falling into more recently the nft space uh doing some generative art experiments with with people I met in in this journey and getting very uh close to We Three communities working on Art and uh and in that context V and I reconnected and uh it was an opportunity to work on the onchain onchain assets something very close to my heart is working with with artists who are releasing their work works on chain and the most of that is digital so it was quite exciting to uh come back in this new context after after many years knowing each other that's that's uh me and that show I think we'll unpack some of this as we get through the the podcast today absolutely uh appreciate that introduction and I think that's a great segue to Mattereum as an idea as a as a project the potential opportunities that Mattereum unpacks uh and brings to the world as it evolves and ideal objectives uh has far- ranging impact across various uh asset classes creators producers consumers Etc in today's podcast the made in one in 2.0 we are going to be diving into the gold asset class so super excited before we get into that a quick rundown because we have covered this over the years um which is quite rare to say with most crypto projects um even though I I not inclined to calling Mattereum a traditional crypto project because it is so connected with trafi and policy and various other aspects before we do dive into the gold piece Vin would you mind

[4:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=251s) sharing the original thought motivation inspiration behind Mattereum why does the world need Mattereum so briefly um in 1999 I took 100% of my income using a digital currency that was backed by physical gold and I would literally take my tokens cash them out of the system into gold coins sell the gold coins for cash and pay my rent and I did that for most of a year I knew that digital currency was the future I asked the company I was working for to pay me in digital currency they thought I was crazy but nonetheless they did it and here we are so for me the idea of crypto without the ability to buy and sell real world stuff is just crypto is completely broken useless right if you can't buy a house using bit coin without turning the Bitcoin back into Fiat first and you've only got the payment going and there's no sort of digital deed that comes back what exactly is crypto accomplishing in that instance and the answer is zero right we're in this inter walking Maze of Ponzi schemes piled on top of each other to roughly the height of bur Bernie mad's feather bed mattress but that interlocking Maze of Ponzi schemes is not generating wealth it's extracting wealth from people that buy tokens hoping that something will happen it doesn't actually make money it just moves money around and in that sense crypto is just a direct continuation of the existing Financial system which is staggeringly extractive if we want crypto to be part of building a better world it has to exchange value for goods and services and it has to do that in a way that solves problems that the existing Financial system creates for example environmental sustainability social justice the ability to get what you buy without having a huge risk of being defrauded all those kind of core problems are problems that are totally within scope for crypto technically but getting crypto to actually deliver on that potential is hard and this is what we do but without it what the heck is crypto for makes perfect sense so Mattereum in its core is aiming to solve some of the fundamental drawbacks and challenges that crypto inherently has created in its mission to create a decentralized EOS system it's created certain challenges and I think this is an extension of your initial work with the ethereum foundation as well the idea that that germinated before ethereum took Route and momentum post ethereum launch would that be correct yeah I mean I we started working on this I mean I was talking to people about the need to

[6:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=401s) solve this problem when I was at the foundation Foundation wasn't willing to back it as a project tried to get consensus to back it did a bunch of work with consensus on other projects they were never interested in backing this So eventually I had to go do it myself but you know this is the thing of just experience right experience in school because I had been paid in Gold back tokens and i' had regularly turned tokens into physical gold to me there was no ambiguity that this was both possible and desirable right I had personal lived experience of that for everybody else in crypto at the time this was Theory almost nobody had actually had that lived experience so I went into crypto I went into ethereum like so obviously the next thing we do is we bind the tokens to physical things and at that point we have a kind of you know digital economy platform which we could use to really transform the world this would be amazing and everybody else because they'd never seen it they' never done it they locked the lived experience you know that as like woo scary magic oh woo scary magic like but no no the tokens live in a separate World crypto is a different universe and in the crypto Universe we can do anything we like and I just looked at that like yeah but how are you going to pay your rent how are you going to buy a house if you need a car how do these tokens turn into cars and everybody just assumed the answer to that was to turn into at first so this idea that you had a separate crypto universe that was made of elves and unicorns and fairies and stuff and then there was a real world and the only be them was an exchange where you would take your fairy coin turn it into dollars and then you would transact in the regular economy to me that was like no no no no no no no no no you guys are not thinking big enough there is a much bigger play which is that you go directly from cryptocoins into physical things into goods and services into contract law and you just go directly into the physical without this barrier and that question of whether crypto exists in a parallel universe that plays by its own rules or whether crypto is an integrated part of the real world that changes the real world is the core philosophical struggle in crypto and unfortunately it's very poorly articulated like very few people in crypto understand that it was a political decision to decide that crypto lived in its own universe and was not part of the real world and what went along with that political decision was a set of technical decisions and the technical decisions were bonded the fact that CH analysis exists and can fairly reliably identified nearly all crypto accounts and bind them to a real name is

[9:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=551s) an indication that people have the idea that crypto happens in a separate universe but in practice it happens in the same universe as everything else so we we take the cost of being in the same universe because all the transactions are actually visible to government but we don't get the benefit of being in the real world because we're still basically trading in imaginary value for other imaginary value because we haven't gotten down to actual goods and services actual goods and services is precisely Mattereum score principle focuses on real world assets rwa R and it's the lag work right like if you want to get a physical thing tied to a token the people that control the physical thing have to be legally obligated to the people that have the token right whether it's a house whether it's a gold bar whether it's an intellectual property license whatever the real world thing is the people that currently control that thing have to be properly legally obligated to the Token the the definition of ownership the definition of property is about networks of legal obligation so you know what Mattereum does is it basically correctly executes creates and executes the networks of legal obligations so that the real world asset is actually a real world doet it's not rocket science in principle it's quite hard to do in practice but just the idea that the the token is legally recognized as ownership of the thing and that works everywhere people think this is impossible but actually we've been doing it for years it actually works fantastic and I think this is a

[10:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=641s) great opportunity to dive into the token so Mattereum gmbh is in the stage one sales of the matter token matr and kamam I would love for you to explain the rationale and logic behind the matter token yeah I'll give a high level View and I think V can can also jump into some of the details here the the the token launch which which kicked off around January it's in a pre-sale phase uh we have this token it's in six months uh pre-launch before it goes live and and anyone in the world apart from folks in the US and the UK can can buy this uh it's a utility token offers a discount on transactions through Mattereum and and the you can buy this to our partner in Germany which is a regulated exchange called swarm that foces exclusively on real world asset so that's in a nutshell how the the what the token is what it facilitates so Vinay's been talking about bringing real world assets on chain the benefits of using crypto to buy sell trade those assets but I think where're if you were to just see where we are at this point in time when it comes to to high value transactions on chain the cost of of moving money around is well established in the financial world you apply percentages every time it goes from one hands to another with onchain transactions you have you have a totally different logic around this based around the the cost of the transaction being priced in in gas and as as ethereum has moved through its Evolution over the last few years that the latest up rades have brought down that cost significantly materials focus on high value assets such as gold art real estate this if you think of the sequence of what needs to happen for there to be economic benefits to moving things on chain I think one has already happened very quietly which is cost of transaction has has basically come down quite significantly what that means in practice is if you're moving hundreds of thousands of dollars around instead of paying a few percentages on it you might just pay a fixed fee of $50 which is a huge shift but I think where this sits with Mattereum is the idea that you would bring high value assets online and trade let's say stablecoins ether Bitcoin to

[13:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=791s) purchase those assets suddenly becomes viable in a way that it competes with using cash because it's just cheaper and you don't lose a lot of money along the way so there there are a few things that are happening right now that feed into the the overarching picture of where Mattereum is sitting in terms of having trading efficiencies through through onchain listing of assets and trading of it the most obvious one right now is you can save money by by doing things this way it hasn't percolated to masses yet as you know setting up a wallet and going on chain and doing things in a self custodial way is what crypto natives do but for the rest of the world it's pretty scary to to even operate this way so I think the pieces of Jigsaw pieces of that jigsaw coming together where Mattereum sits in all is as a company that's gone into the complexities of bringing physical assets on CH what this is represented through the Mattereum Asset passport there's there are a bunch of fields in this product that tell you what the asset is who where it came from who's responsible if this asset is in dispute and all of that is legally can be asserted in a legally defendable way globally there's a whole bunch of stuff to unpack around that that six years in the make we're not necessarily going to go through that in this call you can go through it on the website and also there's it is mentioned in the tokenomics paper I think bring that together the world where you can bring high value assets on chain in a legally defendable way means that you can now get into new use cases around for example portfolio management with your crypto Holdings you can go into stablecoins or you could go into physical gold that is something that Mattereum facilitate and I I think the bringing the cost of transactions down is another facet that has happened only the last few months that will also that will accelerate such adoption however the topic is quite dead so in the podcast when it comes to talking about the token I would say what Mattereum is going is is in the direction of transaction volumes for bringing physical assets on J going the direction of the new new use cases for assets on chain but I think the legal underpinnings to facilitate all of that is where Mattereum is at and that token is a representation of that it's the key that allows you to bring those assets on chain and and buying the token now will give you a discount in terms of doing that and today if anyone wants to buy

[15:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=941s) the token the matter token they can do it exclusively on Swamp one of the questions we get asked often is why can I not buy the to matter token on dexes or centralized exchanges that are typical run of the M why swarm colum what was the motivation to partner with them on the stage one pre-sale there are a few reasons I think the main consideration with all this is to have a trusted partner that can do kyc AML on buyers we're selling a product through the token and it's very important that we have buyers are verifiable where whom we're going to be doing business with and as a pre-sale that it which ends on July the 4th opportunities for this to be on dexas is not excluded from us it will be available on dexas at that point just at this point you can get it at a at a fixed price and you can get it at a point where you can buy quantities of it before the public gets a hold of it the

[16:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=1005s) the core this sounds a little strange to people unless they are really far down the legal Rabbit Hole the key legal Advantage is that swarm is both inside of the EU but also inside of Germany so German law has some very specific Provisions for token issuing financial institutions which are extremely advantageous right I mean the reason that you could go to swarm and you can buy tokenized Tesla stock is because German law makes that possible most other exchanges you cannot go and buy tokenized Tesla stock and the same Provisions that allow for tokenized Tesla stock also allow for things like tokenized real estate so when we get to these kind of real world assets you need supportive legislation to be able to do this stuff properly you could wait it out of the Cayman Islands you could do some set of promises that you're making as you do business from oh Panama is another place a lot of places are set up but the difference between we are regulated in Panama and we are regulated in Germany is really a factor of trust right now the things that the Germans allow you to do for example those are not easily replicated in say France they're not easily replicated in say Switzerland so there are specific Provisions in German law and when Mattereum was looking around in terms of a part for handling real estate tokens for handling gold tokens for handling all these kinds of things we searched for the right set of laws in jurisdictions then we found a partner in the jurisdiction that had the supportive law and Mattereum has a two-part process so there are a set of things that happen in English law which do things like the asset definitions the asset passport what is this thing who underwrites this thing if there's a fault who pays for the thing is this you know who insures this thing all that stuff English law done out of the London entity the issuance of the tokens for things the part where you actually meant the nft and all the rest of that stuff all that stuff is happening nicely in Germany because that's where the supportive legislation is for that process so basically we have different activities in different jurisdictions so that we can basically use the best available laws globally to do the thing that we're doing H and that was not an easy approach to develop right that that is a fairly Hefty bit work because we were not looking for the place in the world that had the least regulation we were looking for the place in the world the best regulation and the best regulation is not the same as the least regulation what we need to get real world assets done at scale is supportive relationships with government and I realize in crypto that's just like what did he just say let me say that again supportive relationships with government

[19:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=1155s) the governments are not against crypto the governments are against SCS they don't mind new technology being adopted by Banks or financial services companies they want the existing players of the game to continue to evolve into con continue to use technology they're very hostile and suspicious of new players but if you look at the general behavior of crypto you know if you have a you hear that a young relative who has just you know gotten hold of some money from a great new job is investing all of it in crypto do you worry for that person or do you think they're making great choices right and the governments feel the same way like this all seems like a terrible nest of Fraud and viers and things and maybe we should regulate that out of existence you know we've not covered ourselves in GL is an industry here so the idea of working with government in Partnership using enabling legislation building on the platforms that are created and offered this is not the way the industry really thinks right now and the real world asset game you don't have a choice about working with government you don't get a choice you you have to play by the rules because what gives you ownership of a real world asset is that a government agrees that you have owners ownership itself is a created product of government governments create property rights so if we want to move real world asset property rights around on chain the governments have to agree that when you moved it on chain you actually moved it and that doesn't always require new legislation you could get an enormous amount done with existing legislation and contract law but at the end of the day when all is said and done either the token connects to the real world us or it doesn't so we created the German subsidiary the German subsidiary is an independent entity with its own set of you know governance and rules and it's a German company and has German director and you know blah blah blah blah blah what that allows for is the issuance of a token the token is inside of the German system it has terms it has conditions you can't buy in the UK because UK worldw does not really permit that you cannot buy in America because American law doesn't permit it so the areas where you can use the areas where you can't use the jurisdictional stuff you wind up with a a very expensive Patchwork of different things happening in different places but the ability to success ly execute that patwork is the thing that allows you to be a real world asset company that actually does real world assets rather than a real world asset company that does one asset class in one jurisdiction one time you know it's a very different approach because we went into this expecting to build out

[21:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=1305s) the infrastructure for the entire ethereum platform in the same way that there you know ens is the name space for all the ethereum stuff in terms of like all the ethereum keys the name space for all ethereum Keys ens the name space for all physical Assets in ethereum Mattereum it was always intended Ethereum is the Ethereal thing that does the smart contract Mattereum is the connector where between ethereum tokens in the real world any ethereum token that wants to touch the real world is a Mattereum asset passport identity this was a vision at the beginning that's a fantastic way to articulate how Mattereum fits into this entire puzzle and I think that's one of the key areas and Colum mentioned one that I want to underscore which is the hidden cost and complexity of owning an asset even if within the same geography the amount of hidden cost that an individual has to deal with or an institution has to deal with while trying to acquire a new asset is often a work in progress It's often something they discover as they go along the purchase process Mattereum and onchain and decentralization and the radical transparency and Clarity that a Mattereum asset passport is likely to deliver is something that dramatically changes the equation to make it more for the free flow of assets across geographies in a way that is supported by policy and government is on your side rather than you trying to Rebel Against the Machine um that said uh when I think this is a great opportunity for us to go into the one asset class that everyone around the world can agree on and loves to talk

[23:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=1405s) about which is gold on chain we have heard of multiple stories in the past where gold on chain has been spoken about tried test it never really took off recently Mattereum made a major announcement a partnership with a key player I would love to give uh see the stage to you okay so normally we're very careful not to go negative and we don't talk crap about other people's projects but in this case I will make an exception so the problem that we have is that stable dollar nominated stablecoins usdt usdc have a bunch of structural problems and I will highlight three of them so structural problem number one is that the dollar is on fire right everybody wonders whether the US election is going to go okay or whether the dollar itself is a risky asset to hold because of us political risk inflation and all the rest of the stuff the quality of governance from America is not so good second problem we have is the opacity of the reserves of these currencies so there is really no app absolute Clarity that the usdt backing and the usdc backing are adequate to the number of tokens issued right it's not that there is just a clear visible portfolio where they list out look we own the following things and here's the big spreadsheet and you can calculate what it's worth and you can see our positions for commercial reasons that information is not available but given the quality of governance which is typical not only in crypto but in finance this is in s calls to work and it doesn't have to be that these things are actually broken but the fact that we can't be entirely sure that they're not broken creates doubt and doubt means discount if I have a financial instrument and I'm not exactly sure what it's worth I will tend to low ball the price of it to reflect the uncertainty so there is uncertainty around the backing for usdc and usdt but the uncertainty is not reflected by the price they will tell you A dollar is a dollar is a dollar but there is doubt associated with these dollars and when you look at the doubt associated with those dollars it is not priced into the sales so usdc and usdt are visibly verifiably worth less than a dollar once you risk compensate now of course crypto as an industry is not so good at risk compensating the asset prices but nonetheless this is here F and that that is one of the things that prevents spread why is there only $140 billion usdc well if you have a lot of money you're constantly risk calculating so if

[25:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=1555s) you were going to go to a financial institution and say hey how's about we turn $10 billion of our dollar Reserve into usdc the response is going to be how risky is that the risk is too high big players won't use it so the third thing is that we've already seen a bunch of deegs so usdc had 10% of its Reserve or something like that in Silicon Valley Bank Silicon Valley Bank ran into trouble they dep pegged by something like 12 or 15% uh I want to say it might be as high as 60 so the fact that you could have a dollar denominated instrument trading for 80 something cents the only reason that it recovered is because the government bailed out Silicon Valley Bank there was no statutory requirement for Silicon Valley Bank to get the bailout the government could simply said not our circus not our monkeys allowed silicon value back to go bankrupt at that point there would have been a 3 billion dollar Gap in the usdc reserve and at that point the remainder of those tokens would been Trading unbounded the price would have come down possibly catastrophically and you would have seen another FDX sized hole in the industry and that's not us DC's Fault by the way you they use a real bank that everybody else used but the banking system itself introduces risks and those risks are transmitted to the stable so our assertion is basically this there is very little actual point in having door denominated tokens as stablecoins because you cannot make a do denominated token that is as good as a Federal Reserve dollar so if I have an account with a federal reserve and I have a dollar in that Federal Reserve account that is in every way shape or form except one a better dollar than you could get out of a dollar denominated stablecoin the assertion is that these two instruments should trade at the same price that is obviously not true and this creates a staggeringly large Market inefficiency which gold then comes in and neatly solves so when we talk talking about where gold fits into this there are then multiple approaches gold you can take gold and you can handle it in a way which is exactly as shaky as the way that we handle dollars in stablecoins you have a bunch of gold it's stored in a bunch of gold vaults you don't tell people which vaults you don't tell people how much some of it is gold ETFs some of it is marato delivery orders some of it is physical gold in the vault you control but you don't tell anybody anything and it's not audited properly and at that point there's no advantage to using gold it's just another crappy asset handle in a crappy way to get it to work what you need is

[28:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=1705s) total transparency for audit here is one token this token is for bar 123 bar 123 is in the following Vault you can go and talk to Bar 123's Vault and they will tell you that they have physical custody of the bar here are all the legal documents that provide control of the bar and your lawyers can look over the stuff here are all the insurance certificates here are all the policy numbers here are all the ways of independently verifying all of that data here's a complete portfolio on the asset with absolutely nothing up anybody's sleeve this is exactly what you are buying at the point where you buy it your lawyer agrees we put money in here here's the documentation we got that is good enough for our purposes we would consider that to be the same as ownership as if we had physical custody of the bar have a nice day and that kind of ultra transparency should not be big news in crypto but it is everybody everybody everybody is taking the worst of trfy and then tokenizing the worst of trfi not the way what you want is the best of TR F Ultra transparent highly audited super heavily insured everybody can see everything and at that point the promise of this token holds this value becomes as der risked as it is possible to do for any asset in or out of crypto in the world past having for example a gold bracelet on your wrist it's as close as you could get legally speaking to physical custody of gold um and at that point that's a genuinely hard asset and you could could put that into the stablecoin ecosystem as a stable nft and those stable nfts would have utility because there are so much more stable in most future scenarios gold does not cover carry dollar risk there is no question about the opacity of the ownership mechanisms or how much gold is there because one nft equals one bar and it's this specific numbered bar and you can then validate the ownership of the bar and there's none of the sort of baked in systemic issues Highway TR transparent extremely hard no political risk etc etc uh and then people come back and say well there's all the questions about custody and we can talk about that that's a separate issue but the bottom line is the combination of good custody and insurance it's just the hardest possible asset that anybody knows how to make short of holding physical gold yourself that's a great way to put it and gold again is one of the factors where the US dollar also gets some Flack even though it is the uh currency that sets the markets globally

[30:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=1855s) for trade and not just crypto colam

[30:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=1858s) recently there was a press release from Mattereum announcing this uh partnership I'm just going to share my screen and pull up the press release and would love for you to take us through this I think it's quite exciting to to announce this it's been on the cards for a while I think just to take a step back one one aspect of the token launch in the token paper we do talk about putting gold on chain as being one of the the key points in during this this token launch period and and in order to do that we do need to to bring Partners on board uh who who Supply gold and can be long-term partners for for the trading of gold Sea is one of those partners and and announcing this putting this announcement out was was very important we're piloting uh ways how we can use the Mattereum asset passport to to list their their gold bars and prototyping those those mechanisms on chain as as we speak Mattereum is not shying away from from one of the hardest asset classes out there uh to tokenize onchain also to know that each Mattereum asset passport is a specific gold bar it's a representation of a specific gold bar that is wted certified it's also quite interesting how this would work and how this becomes a more practical investment opportunity for let's say institutions and individuals uh than the the standard options on chain so the the critical thing here is that what we're after is backing for large funds right if you're for example issuing stablecoins you might want to put some gold into that portfolio as a way of providing a backend that is you know genuinely stable uh if you are a large crypto investor and you've got a lot of money in Bitcoin you want to cash that out into something that is less volatile than Bitcoin to project your wealth um because you think Bitcoin will come down and then you'll buy back in at the bottom those kinds of operations you just don't want to go into the dollar which is a thing that you bought Bitcoin to get away from it's like this this whole thing of the thesis of crypto in many ways is dull or bad and then if you make a bunch of money in crypto you either keep it in a super volatile instrument or you move into the dollar that's obviously where gold fits in the store and then the question is are we buying heavily heavily heavily opaque gold storage or or am I simply buying a gold bar I'm just going to buy a gold bar you're going to buy a gold bar for ether

[33:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=2008s) Bitcoin usdc yeah sure okay what's the shortest clearest easiest way of buying a gold bar one nft one bar if you fractionalize the nfts right so if you come along and say okay one f 1ft one bar and then we take that bar and we put it in a pool of other bars and then we issue one G tokens against those bars inevitably in the middle of that you wind up with a legal entity and you wind up with an audit problem which is I have to prove that I have not issued more gold tokens than the bars that I've got if I own a bunch of those gold tokens then the question is also can I retrieve an underlying bar so if you have 1 kgam bars in your reserve and I own 1100 gr of gold can I come to you and say give me a 1 kg bar and if I do is that process efficient Mattereum has already done this we did a test batch of bars probably 3 years ago and that test batch of bars people cashed in the nfts and took the physical gold bars out and it was a painful process we had had not realized how difficult it was to do things like ship gold internationally we were relatively new to gold at that point and this is also a part of why it's so important that the industry partners that we're working with are not new to Gold SSA is the oldest gold gold refinery in Spain and it's one of the 66 refineries in the world that has membership of the organization which produces gold bars for banks and governments they produced a standard called the good delivery bar and the good delivery bar is literally the gold standard for gold it's a $100,000 gold brick roughly the size of a house the Integrity of the high level gold supply chain is very close to unquestioned but it's not unquestioned in the sense of everybody just pretends it works and and there are no questions asked it's that every single thing in that chain is crawled over by experts because the possibility of fraud in the good delivery bar system is so completely devastating nobody's going to let it happen so what you're basically buying at that point is access to the same Ultra hard Ultra protected Ultra scrutinized Ultra audited gold Machinery which is used by governments and by Banks you're not buying consumer gold you're not buying a shaky promise on gold you're not buying gold three tiers down in some kind of weird looking Arrangement what you're getting is the closest shortest Pathway to the same kind of gold reserves that are held by the big players and that I think is a genuinely new offering there is a fair amount of gold in crypto but it's gold that doesn't have the decisive advantage vantages of the better end of the gold

[35:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLenzGvTSU&t=2158s) industry it's gold which is a bit like usdc owns a bunch of gold and that's part of the reserve well it still has the opacity problems it still has the audit problems we move all the way away from opaque we move all the way away from un audited and we get into the bright harsh clear sunlight and then we attach an nft to it and the nft they've gotten so much flak over the years they've gotten so much flak the nft infrastructure is fine people attached nfts to a bunch of things that weren't really property and then sold them as if they were property and it made a big mess at the end of the day the nft infrastructure is fine we have thought so often about just getting rid of the term nft and using something like transferable proof of ownership oh it's exactly like an nft in every way only we call it a transferable proof of ownership we just bit the bullet we call it nft here's transferable proof of ownership I think the netive changes dramatically when you think of an nft one of the things Elon Musk mentioned in a podcast that's getting a lot of coverage is when he said an nft is essentially a URL a hyperlink to a JPEG in this particular case you have a nft that is a representation to a real piece of gold a real bar of gold in a vault somewhere in the world I think that just is a tectonic shift in the narrative absolutely in that musk thing right you know it's a URL to a JPEG it's a URL to 60 pages of legal documents and the 60 pages of legal documents then bind you to the goal right like yes the nft is a pointer but when the pointer is to 60 pages of legal documents and then a lawyer reads the legal documents and says yeah that constitutes ownership of the gold for our purposes how much better is it going to get right and if you have a specific lawyer and the specific lawyer looks at it and says actually I don't like the look of that right at that point we are now in a question where we have a dialogue with the lawyers this is the version 1.1 of the paperwork does everybody agree that's okay no three people say wait wait wait we want that to be different we feel that they doesn't cover their Shard okay that's an interesting point maybe we should add additional Insurance products at that point and update the P paper so it's not that this thing starts in the final form right it starts with something that we think everybody agrees is good enough but over the next 20 years that's going to go from 60 pages of documentation to 8,000 pages of documentation and it will be huge standard template contracts and it will be incredibly sophisticated and that is exactly what happened with derivatives contracts there's roughly a trillion dollar of derivative contracts in the world almost all of them use a standard template document called the isda international swaps and derivatives

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/559-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [559] Gold RWA arrive onchain!, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.