# How Crypto Interacts With Real World Assets > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [569]. 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, 2022-12-06 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Contracting layer for real assets. - Career works it belongs to: - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about 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: - 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) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (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: English law (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); Mars (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); real estate (5 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated); IPO (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); William Shatner (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 1 undated); Shatner (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); commodities (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Singapore (1 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); tokenization (1 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); markets (3 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.32 (1.00 is the top), number 225 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [722] ["10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA... (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/722.md): close in content (cosine 0.92) - [682] [Ep. #641 - Vinay Gupta on China, Futurism, Government,... (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/682.md): close in content (cosine 0.91) - On the same works, just before: [671] [‘Expensive and Uncertain: The Markets Where Mattereum... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/671.md); [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md); [571] [The Second Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 21 Sept 2022 (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/571.md) - On the same works, just after: [568] [The Third Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup, 30 Nov 2022 (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/568.md); [567] [The Fourth Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 8th Feb 2023 (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/567.md); [566] [Why Global Trade Will Inevitably Move To The Blockchain (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/566.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: How Crypto Interacts With Real World Assets, video, 2022-12-06, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [569], https://guptaoption.com/texts/569.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74&t=0s) so one group talk about is literally where's the money right here we are we're now well 16 years into crypto seven or eight years into ethereum you know there's been an enormous amount of height fortunes made fortunes lost made lost made lost made lost made lost and we could do them all better right getting out of this cycle of hype instruction hype and destruction and hype of Destruction and another bunch of you know awful hideous malfeas and nonsense happens in a whole bunch of people go I mean just we've seen this and it seems to be never ending because it just turns out it deregulated Finance is not really safe at any speed right it doesn't mean it couldn't be made to work but we don't have mechanisms and as a result we're stuck in this handle cyclical blue blood I'm not how cyclical boom and blow up we have to escape if we're going to turn this into a real industry rather than something which is going to be like the Baja TV show jokes in 20 years like I don't know friends so to escape this cyclical boom bust cycle we have to prove fundamentally valuable Assets in right we have an amazing transactional Machinery we can buy and sell anything on the blockchain as long as it can be defined using some kind of digital record right right I don't mean anything right things that you didn't even think were property became property you know certainly imaginary monkeys right um um I'm publicly tradable essentially stock and companies only just begun to exist you know like you do an IPO off your original deck like lots and lots and lots of things have been tried where we've invented new classes and property and then we've sold those new classes of property on train what I want to suggest is that the flaws of the blockchain industry are the flaws of the new classes of property that we're trading not flaws of the technology for trade we have exchange infrastructure which is powerful enough to do anything you can imagine the new asset class you can turn it into a toolkit you can sell the tokens in the exchange infrastructure could carry it but the problem is that most of these newly invented hands of property are crap and as a result you get one or you've got a wave of enthusiasm where every result property is amazing and then the new kind of properties just to improve [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74&t=150s) so what I'm suggesting is a strategic platform we can separate out the Fantastic technology we have for doing trade from the crappy assets which turned out to explode every time you look at them and here right hard assets like gold real estate other kinds of commercial assets loaded into the blockchain with the existing trans architectures that we have I believe this is the future of the crypto industry right it's the everything Exchange and all of the infrastructure that we've built over the stuff is non-fungible or fungible whether it's physical Atomic things or whether it's liquid assets like I know wheat or a quarter or whatever happens the we have a global exchange infrastructure that's capable Hardware we have ways of minting the things creating the managing them you know we could build extremely transparent representations of value where you can drill down digitally to see every last detail about something and if this is what we do in the next round of activity in the crypto industry that round might be run as a dozen bus because the collapse in these systems has not been a collapse triggered by The Exchange infrastructure feeling it's a collapse it's been triggered by the assets failure now you know here fex kind of exception but generally speaking apart from improve where we manage Financial infrastructure like bear starters it's not that the underlying Machinery goes wrong in the Bitcoin blockchain Falls over and every loses a bit the machines for moving the value are secure they also the sources of value are less secure if we put more secure Hardware volume chain we're going to ever enough work we're getting unbearable so there's a report about this stuff that just came out from Boston Consultant Group the report is startled we were right in the middle of the space and we thought this would work remarkably startling they're talking about 10 who will GDP 16 trillion a year of tokenized legal assets by 2030. right and you know they're not the only people talking with this iraction there's a whole bunch of other sources of making noises in this direction there seems to be a general consensus the Heart Hospital comes next and that consensus is from Real World entities like you know Deutsche Bank you know JP Morgan like actual players in the real world say tokenization of equity [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74&t=300s) security tokens Bond markets equity and real estate all of these kinds of things are what they see is being viewed through the space and these numbers get much larger than the entire crypto industry very quickly because we're not creating that value from scratch as Bitcoin gross we're being worthy of 25 cents to twenty five thousand dollars what we're talking about is taking existing value and just moving how the values transfer instead transferred or Crest through transferring it only for example um and this kind of growth it's it's predictable in as much as if you have better exchange technology but people have to sell something to buy something they will do it using one of the capacity of exchange is basically will exchange for buying and selling something it's a crypto exchange a crypto actually just reward itself but at this point before you were looking at was a bunch of hard assets like gold classic cars oil paintings 50 tons of wheat 35 Acres of agricultural land if all those things are trading in the same exchange as some Bitcoins in ether is that crypto extreme Charisma just the everything Exchange right as long as you can figure out how to tokenize the value then you combine and sell them the same exchange the infrastructure we have using the blockchain seeking to systems performance and that doesn't have to say within this tokenized business as usual sector right it is possible to go from tokenized business as usual right this set master here was today but they almost select the other Equity investment funds bonds all this stuff yes you can to organize all that stuff you can securitize it you can have security exchanges in the world but also this other token advisable assets which they've got 4.8 trillion by 2030. that doesn't have to be existing classes of us it's not to be new kinds of families right securitizations revenue streams there's a bunch of that stuff happening in crypto it's not so much done in the real world that could become a large sector you will must expect sort of rockets on Mars by that time you know that he's going to use the blockchain to handle property rights on Mars and all probability because if you're going to take a new plant and carve up into acres and people could go to the solar models probably the natural thing to do would be to use a blockchain in the same way if you did it in the 1990s you'd use an SQL database so this Prospect taking the existing systems together in the blockchain and [7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74&t=450s) taking new systems and getting them on training you wind up in a position where everything becomes interfunctional rather than having a bunch of separated vulcanized markets which are very very very Loosely connected this also opens up possibilities for things like smart marker you know there's something called me or swap they have an algorithm for switching around value between lots of different people as long as everything is represented as nfts without requiring it to be bought and sold at every step extremely powerful because it means you can do trained minimum liquidity um and it's not an unrealistic rate of growth let me say 2030 16 trillion dollars if you look at the influx of stable inconsiders you know 160 billion of foreign assets went into the crypto ecosystem in a two-year period right and the rapidity of that transfer was because you didn't have to make the assets from scratch the assets were already there you just move them out with wire transfer line and you put them back into blockchain mod and so if you were doing this kind of transfer but it was stopped it was bonds it was real estate it was gold blue and it was everything else you could get a very very very rapid movement of trillions of valuable chain without having this weird thing that money is being printed account number it's not affiliate economy at this point it's actually an artist um no the question there is could this possibly work is it legally possible to do this right and the answer is yes right my company has done this in um custody assets of five jurisdictions and transactions in another three out of the 170 jurisdictions that it's possible to do this so this is not some kind of like long-term long-reach pipe dream buying and selling physical assets as tokens with the correct legal bindings behind them is a thing you could review or know over almost the entire world right it's trickier with the things that you're buying and selling or things like Securities but if you're selling commodities or you're selling gold bricks or whatever is you know physical art or classic cars the vast majority of this battle rather civilization is salemable right now all over the world on relatively you know clear and easily understood deterministic legals it's not that we need massive changes in one every jurisdiction to be able to do this but Island settlement of physical object on eBay and buying themselves a physical object are open so it was very similar [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74&t=600s) to the wall um and that track record right we've literally just gone last year and a half asset class by asset class by asset class by asset class starting with the infamous William Shatner toy collection it's a memorabilia um yeah um you know just as we did to Japanese us so but there are no Klingons though there's some perennial things so that landscape you know we've just kind of gone after class by asset class by RC classified as a class making sure that it works in the course of a year and a half we literally went from Shoppers memorabilia collection to a two million dollar plot of land on the south coast of England and that trajectory is not just stuff inside of the UK that's across a whole bunch of different countries so that capability now that it's here right we can scale assets on this far from very very very fast and we are not the only people doing this right we took a couple of different approach from most of the other companies who are in this space most of those companies operating inside of one jurisdiction for one asset class we went a little deeper into the weevils we sold it for a whole set of jurisdictions and a whole bunch of different asset classes but at the end of the day it's not just a Mattereum does this amazing thing it's this amazing thing is the future of the blockchain space a whole bunch of different people have understood about them um what does the space look like in two years if you come to conferences like this and two-thirds of the room are gold industry real estate industry airline industry talking about tokenizing and selling the physical things that they're buying and selling airline tickets concert tickets real estate you know I keep coming back to Boolean because given how unstable financial markets are and how much inflation we have bullion is a potentially very important asset class once you can make it appropriately tradable International blockchain sell transactions rather than the current restrictions which make it hard to make things um you know the reason that we can do all of this stuff is British law is really really substantial on these kind of issues the legal Innovation that's happened in the UK in the last five years in terms of really getting down to the bones of all the blockchain is what blockchain transactions our book tokens are how all of this stuff really works is obviously world class I mean you know this stuff is profound right the the law [12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74&t=750s) commission has a consultation to implement it's a philosophical examination of what digital is right you're very sophisticated legal minds of looking in digital and saying from first principles under English common law what is that really and the advantage of that transfer us as the industry is right now the sort of power grab is that everything is being seen as a financial instrument this will change though right if something is regulated as being a toy then if it's a digital story or physical so it's still a toy in a wish called the horses this is how you handle twice and here's the digital part and here's the uh non-digital part of the law so in breaking down this idea that everything will change as a financial asset it also hugely reduces the complexity of doing ordinary everyday things on chain because you get ordinary you know if you're a corner shop that makes nfts you really shouldn't be regulated in the same way as the fact right you're an artist you're working artist you have a wolf to paint things you take pictures and you sell pictures if I sell them on eBay and I don't need any kind of license and if I sell them as an nfk you know it's just the regulation is kind of a lot and the reason the regulation is a walk is because it wasn't a regulatory problem there's a legislative problem and the UK Judiciary of going through the process of figuring out the correct legal treatment of these things and if you compare this approach to how primitive the approach is in for example America this is kind of sort of what Britain does for a living we're really good at this kind of deep problem solving in a lot of different domains this one happens to be legal but don't forget that AI Revenue should also start in the UK with deepmind so this is the sort of fundamental bedrock and then in the UK right this this idea is the most senior civil judge in the UK so these are the possible bosses for ranking commercial visited from blockchain delivered I think February of this year and the real payable is the section at the bottom right my hope is that English covered wall will prove through the law of choice for the murderous blockchain technology as the subject grows exponentially the months and years to come right drawing parallels to the 600 trillion of OTC derivatives that currently run under English law right and those derivatives are from all over the world but because you can transfer the seat of dispute so you can [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74&t=900s) pick your choice of Courts and judges right everybody that come and bring their disputes into English common law does because our system of justice is kind of fantastic right I mean you know yes it's still Warriors and yes it's still hard but it's a dramatically that's hard because there's so much sophistication in the legal system no offense sorry yeah yeah but nonetheless we have high level support there's no doubt at all that this is an approach is credible um the expectation is that Google flow is going to become better and better and better a handle and digital Assets in a way that is not upsetting and as a result if you bring your digital assets to the UK so they're all handled under UK War you don't wind up with this terrible problem where the local jurisdiction the urine doesn't understand how to handle the assets and you want them regulated you know 120 countries which is the letter we need a uniform framework and if it's good enough for the derivatives more okay it would be good enough how what I was thinking while you're saying that one of the things you cannot do in the United States is you cannot buy contract Grant a court jurisdiction so we can't enter into a contract where I say courts in Kansas or in New York will adjudicated dispute if there's no Nexus to that jurisdiction that's actually not a problem here anybody somebody in Singapore can enter under contract with somebody in Russia saying that disputes will be adjudicated in London and English courts will accept that jurisdiction is my understanding it's a very different approach is smart and particularly if you're working with arbitration arbitration sure so we do multiple different mechanisms for picking your event you need to access the Google on Google once you get physical assets on you still can't get a good cup of coffee here what's coffee so final decide right um so this is a map of what I think are the eight fundamental sources of value on watching just about anybody that is making money on chain is executing one of or more of these strategies and a lot of the confusion and the Damage that we've seen on chain comes because people believe that somebody is executing one strategy and they're actually actually executing another structure so the big problem that we have on shame [17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4wv7Ly7h74&t=1050s) is that you've got people who you think are selling transactional efficiency and there are actually Ponzi schemes yeah and that confusion about what you're doing for a living what business that you're in this is the thing that has brought the blockchain into such terrible dispute because the system is so powerful that you can turn almost anything into a Ponzi scheme without wow so my recommendation is for the next phase of the blockchain make absolutely sure you understand what business your counterparties are in at every single step and for yourselves look at this very hard and make sure that you're somewhere up here with transactional efficiency or you're an exchange or you're selling something that you made yourself and if you're not drifted into one of the Dead zones on this thing because if we're going to save the industry we have to get away from the bad sources of value generation only be the good ones thank you very much [Applause] --- End of [569] How Crypto Interacts With Real World Assets. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [568](https://guptaoption.com/texts/568.md) The Third Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup, 30 Nov 2022 (2022); the most closely related, [722](https://guptaoption.com/texts/722.md) "10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA... (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.