# Mattereum Highlights - Chris Wray - Impact of smart contracts on businesses > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [600]. 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, 2018-10-10 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXImh5tETQc. 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): Transaction-cost argument behind rich data capitalism. - Career works it belongs to: - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine) - Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016): Essay drafted live in public: smart contracts as capitalism's calculus, with richer instruments than cash... (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) - 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) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine) - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: contracts / companies / value (25%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: transaction costs (4 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); contracts (8 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); accounts (2 here; 51 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); smart contracts (1 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); markets (1 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.06 (1.00 is the top), number 657 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [793] [COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md): close in content (cosine 0.92) - [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md): close in content (cosine 0.91) - On the same works, just before: [609] James Bruegger - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [606] Mattereum Highlights - Rob Knight on the idea behind the... (2018); [707] [Vinay Gupta & Marleen Stikker discuss the future of... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/707.md) - On the same works, just after: [721] [Vinay Gupta, founder Mattereum, putting assets on the... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/721.md); [597] Mattereum Smart Property Register - Rob Knight (2018); [598] [Mattereum Smart Property Register - David Salgado (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/598.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: Mattereum Highlights - Chris Wray - Impact of smart contracts on businesses, video, 2018-10-10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXImh5tETQc; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [600], https://guptaoption.com/texts/600.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXImh5tETQc&t=0s) if we believe markets are efficient and having an open competitive marketplace is a good way to get the lowest price for something that we want why would you ever have a comment because in the company it's like a little mini monopoly inside that company there's only you know one place I can go to get my accounts prepared and it's my accounting department are they the most efficient thing - they're not so why don't we just do everything in the marketplace well the answer the cows gave was transaction costs and what he really meant was legal transaction costs so if I want to if I don't really want to be company I want to stay slow and now I'm going to enter into a contract with EMU to do my accounts and I'm going to enter into a contract with you do the packing of the goods delivery and I'm gonna enter it into a contract with you to do the marketing my product I end up with many different legal contractors and for every legal contract I have to worry about okay are the terms right what happens if it goes wrong I think it'll be enforceable it's a lot of effort if you're dealing with assets or property who owns so if I'm going to if I'm going to engage you to help you with some of the product development marketing around it and then we create a new product and so then your brand who owns whoever's that intellectual property who else who has the rights to use it of power we have to address all back in our contract and that takes a lot of time so the attractiveness of a company is that suddenly all this just comes within the country now it's very simple the company owns all the assets you know how are we going to divide up the profit doesn't matter the company owns all the profit and then internally with a clear you know hierarchy but we're board of directors they'll decide what the policy is that decides who gets what proportion of the profit maybe get to bonus maybe you don't so these there's no clear mechanisms in place for addressing all of these issues around how do we share [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXImh5tETQc&t=150s) the profits who owns the assets and we now don't need this complicated network of contractual relationships instead we just have a very simple hub and spoke model all the employees have a contract of employment with the company and all of those contracts of employment are pretty much the same simple because they reduce the legal transaction costs now one of the what can we do with smart contracts well I think some some opportunities definitely arose we can both use the software automation around contracts to make it easier to enter interval so we can move towards and we will move towards a standardization and contracts because now that we want to use software with them we're not going to renegotiate the wording every time because we have a piece of code that's doing something valuable to us and the code is not going to change every time and so there will be a standardization around what the legal written terms are they'll just be some parameters in there some variables but the software can help us fill in those variables at the outset and then automate performance to some degree and automate encouraging good practices business practices and processes around those agreements so we can use the automation we can use some our contract code to actually reduce the effort reduce the costs involved of making contracts and keeping track of them which contracts have I entered into with with whom okay great there's a piece of software is telling me which contracts are lived in to do what the obligations are potentially this could have quite a profound influence of what what our business ecosystems look like because as soon as you start to reduce legal transaction costs now it can become more attractive to have more a marketplace of people providing services and less of a concentration within [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXImh5tETQc&t=300s) so potentially a question to ask is okay which which industries currently have you know maybe one very dominant company providing you know a lot of vertical integration could that be done more efficiently if we started to separate that out into different functions that could be performed by difference that may not have been practical before but it may be practical now so there may be you know potentially large changes over time and you could argue that maybe we're beginning to see that or edit there has already been some of a song trend for I mean 90s you've started to see you know subcontracting of services companies would they wouldn't do the cleaning in the war they wouldn't employ cleaners in their offices they just have a contract with another firm that cleans the offices but that tended to happen for you know simple to describe bigger tasks with small contractors potentially discus stars are happening for much smaller tasks we can see marketplaces where therefore we have colonies there give you another example of how we might see a change in some new business opportunities arising so one of materials clients is project called Ocean protocol and they are addressing a cozy and problem around using data datasets or machine learning so at the moment if you want to produce the self-driving car you need an algorithm unto to operate the vehicle and you need to train that algorithm by a process of machine learning you need huge amounts of data and you you train the algorithm using the data so that it becomes more and more capable in a wider range of circumstances the data here is more important breeding than the algorithm so if you are a small startup and you come up with a great new algorithm but you only have relatively limited data at the moment your only hope is the Google buys you out for a good stuff and if you don't like what Google offers you you may as well give up because you are never going to be able to acquire the data they're never going to give you their data you're never going to get enough data to train your algorithm for it to ever be commercially viable so we have this sort of natural monopoly of data over now at [7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXImh5tETQc&t=450s) the moment if you're if you're a traditional car manufacturer like a Toyota or a BMW you may be worried about this because you know you're worried that these dominant maybe maybe Google they will they will control the future they will be the only companies that have viable algorithms for operating your vehicles and so you know your business is going to be affected while ocean Protocol are doing is trying to break away from this need to concentrate the asset the data in one company so their technology allows you know one party to train its algorithm on someone else's data without that party giving its data to the first one and without this one giving its algorithm to the other party so I won't even try the technology right now but it's you you know you're using some of the new watching based technology it's more contracts around that to allow something to now happen more in a marketplace environment we're now potentially you can have many different sources of data all being made commercially available to anyone who wants to use them for a fee but without without kind of losing control of the data without without the uncertainty around the Romans what so again potentially there's there's many many potential applications of accessories but actually quite far-reaching --- End of [600] Mattereum Highlights - Chris Wray - Impact of smart contracts on businesses. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [721](https://guptaoption.com/texts/721.md) Vinay Gupta, founder Mattereum, putting assets on the... (2018); the most closely related, [793](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md) COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.