# WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with 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: [678], 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, 2022-02-12 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ. 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's legal reach.
- 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)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (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:
  - 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)
  - 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)
- Topics: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (26%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (21%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: semantic web (6 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); NFT (14 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); cost per unit of human benefit (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2022); crypto cash (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2022); Asset Passport (7 here; 33 sources in all, earliest dated 2017, 2 undated); cypherpunk vision (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Ireland (5 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Mattereum (15 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); digital gold (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); real estate (11 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): cost per unit of human benefit; crypto cash; Hope for Mattereum; peer-to-peer trade; prejudice as a service
- Importance: core-text score 0.29 (1.00 is the top), number 267 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: [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md); [702] [Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/702.md); [778] [Vinay Gupta on the Future of the Metaverse (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/778.md)
- On the same works, just after: [790] ['Mattereum is Blockchain Cypherpunk' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/790.md); [735] [Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md); [199] [IG Wines with Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/199.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: WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta, video, 2022-02-12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [678], https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[48:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=2899s) individual and the behavior or the outcome is a better basis for redeemable events or or the the evolution of of behaviors that are nudged towards desirable uh forms then the current uh assumption especially in in in social justice warrior circles that once you failed their uh bar you are irredeemable forever there is no there is no way that you you will be able to to uh do whatever you know if you are a comedian being cancelled yeah that's over right so so it is interesting uh and and i will have to think about it a little bit but i i i will uh take this uh uh alternative of uh of a restitution system rather than a reputation system very good thank you thank you very much and the critical thing about reputation and restitution is restitution doesn't have to come from the person that's screwed up so you know you're my uber driver right you get lost and i miss my fight and it's a disaster and you were doing something you know it's not like we hit traffic you were ignoring the instructions from the robot because you thought you knew better okay we agree this is a problem i claim restitution from uber you know i bought the service from you you're gonna pay me right now at that point i never knew who you were i don't have your name i don't have your address i don't know anything about you and your business relationship with uber might be affected but it might just be you paid your insurance fees because you put six dollars a month into a bucket and that bucket is there to cover claims against drivers when something goes wrong right and that ability to think of this as being about restitution and being about insurance as long as i know who your insurer is i don't need to know who you are right so you give me a digital proof of insurance and i can verify that you are insured but i'm much less worried about who you are because i know if something goes wrong the transaction is insured so it's not that we just take the existing systems of trade and we slap a layer of cryptography on top and now we've got anonymous unaccountable black markets and everybody's running around

[50:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=3049s) causing trouble we've no way of catching anybody and it's a disaster right that's not what we do we change from reputation based to restitution based we use digital proofs of insurance rather than digital proofs of identity and we create a society which is fully accountable and also deeply anonymous

[51:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=3069s) very good um so as people go and visit Mattereum ideally what kind of inquiries or or what kind of potential partnerships or customers or investors would you like to to come banging on your digital door okay so let's talk about investors first we are about to do an a round um so the objective is to raise 30 to 50 million dollars and what we will deliver for that fingers crossed with a little bit of luck this is not investment advice um is a company which is basically 10 times the size of visa and which is the large guardian of global trade in the areas where we need reliable purchases and we need accountability for all parties we've got the technology we've figured out the hardware we've figured out the software we've figured out the legals we've figured out the business arrangements we've figured out the insurance we have all of the parts of the machinery there and we're going to scale it and you know we're going to be throwing around real estate we can already do gold bars up to 750 000 bars and we've worked with celebrities we've done all kinds of different asset classes to demonstrate capability we're about to turn the blockchain into the thing that everybody thought it was five years ago and and is this an equity round round equity on tokens you know accredited investors only obviously because this kind of thing and the vehicle is a uk vehicle or a u.s vehicle it's a uk vehicle um that's great and so what are you going to do with all that money we're going to build scale we're going to take the existing systems we have we're going to automate everything that we possibly can to get transaction costs down um and we're just going to bring on more and more and more stuff to be bought and sold as nfts and what are the the key markets that you will be concentrating on or or you will tackle first you mentioned real estate is arts an important one or it was more like an example so there are two big drivers for what we do um there are markets where the things are very expensive and there are markets where there's lots of uncertainty in the purchase so high value high uncertainty is where we add most value because you know this system that i described with the warranties you could take the risk of buying a house and you could have 15 or 20 warranties from different people

[53:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=3219s) right i'm the guy that did the roof i'm the guy that did the plumbing i'm the guy that installed the kitchen i'm the person that manufactures the stove i'm the person that did the bathroom right all of those different people take legal responsibility for their part of the process all of them carry insurance when i buy the nft for the house when i move in if anything is not as described in the house specification i can make a coin imagine what that's going to do to the real estate industry suddenly houses have specifications and when something isn't in spec you can get your money so there's that um wine is a huge asset class wine is huge because there's two trillion dollars of wine in sellers right now and 400 billion of wine transactions in a year and somewhere between eight and thirty percent of the wine is fake eight percent of the bottom and thirty percent at the top so you know maybe 400 billion of fake wine well oh yeah i mean fake wine per year is tens of billions of dollars maybe might even be 100 billion um so wine is huge art is huge and art is the main place for art is actually new works right so imagine if every artist currently working have those kind of tags on everything that they manufacture game changing right no more fraud in armed everything's been burned you know like right at the beginning of the process it's born digital it's tracked all the way through we know exactly you know what's happening um all the stuff about privacy of ownership by the way this is where the zk snarks come in right so we are probably not going to build snark based systems ourselves because we think the stark technology belongs in the platform rather than the application yeah we might get dragged into it but i'm not keen to get dragged into it but you know i think snarks at the application layer is going to be fragile starts at the platform where it's going to be robust so we really want to use platforms that have starts for the identity layers um

[55:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=3345s) so what did i mention i mentioned real estate wine at gold right we're very interested in doing digital gold we've done a little and we're going to do a lot more uh here's the reason when digital gold right now there's about 200 billion in stablecoins but stablecoin just means dollar coin and dollar coin now means you're losing five to eight percent of your money every year coin so the stablecoins have gone from being stable to gradually shrinking and drinking and drinking and drinking there are no stablecoins now yeah they should be called dollar pegged coins rather than they're not doing that right and you know stable relative to the dollar was okay when the door had zero inflation the dollar now has a lot of inflation so where do you go if you want a stable transaction that isn't the dollar right the answer is not euros the answer is not yen right the answer is gold right because if you have a mix in your portfolio between bitcoin and gold or if you're really paranoid bitcoin dollars of gold right at that point you can adjust your risk profile just by changing the ratio of dollars to gold to bitcoin in your portfolio and really if you're a purist you don't need dollars at all you could just do gold with bitcoin but dollars gold and bitcoin you know that gives you a tripod and you just adjust your balance between those three things to get something that looks pretty stable well at this point most of the people in crypto have dollars in gold uh dollars from bitcoin very few of them have gold so we're going to do an enormous amount of gold to basically fill the gap opened up by dollar inflation in the crypto market and the way that we do gold is very specific to give excellent claims on specific gold bars with numbers on them rather than just grams of gold in an account because how do the gold is there um are you a platform in the sense that can a developer interface with Mattereum integrating it in the system and uh in their system and taking advantage of your infrastructure um so it's pretty much um you know you as an issuer of the nfts right you want to sell physical things you come to us we build the nfts with you we hand you the nfts and you take them to market right at that point it's

[58:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=3495s) an erc721 it's on openc right you can plug it into d5 uh you can move it around you could put it in escrow contracts you could do all the normal crypto stuff with it because it functionally it's an erc721 it's just connected to this enormous legal machinery behind it so you know you kind of move around this little kind of erc721 thing and what's dragged behind it is this enormous legal machinery that makes it into this fully enforceable magic widget what is the cost of the uh the tags are doors you know the chip shortages made them a lot more expensive than they were but i mean we've had quotes as well as three or four doors a tag right but in very large quantity of like slightly less security and these guys these guys are kind of unobtainium because frankly we bought most of the world supply that was available when we got shots um like we just it was an emergency and we just grabbed all the chips that we could about so we've got a bunch of tags um but by the time the supply chain for those to settle down you know it won't be very expensive and it's only going to get cheaper every year yes uh you mentioned india and and of course you are uh or even though i don't know uh were you born in india or uh no i was born in scotland okay so yeah i'm scottish my father was a medical researcher who came across to study rats in the 1970s but but obviously you you recognize and and hopefully i hope cherish your your indian roots oh yeah yeah have you have you kept an eye on the on the recent announcement of india um recognizing uh uh cryptocurrencies and uh and and uh well taxing them at 30 percent which says now more than a billion people and the government uh behind them is extremely interested in the success of uh of crypto because it will become their largest source of income bring us your tax dollars yeah i mean to be honest uh the delicate thing with india is it has so much scale and such an ability to make a mess when it does the wrong thing uh-huh

[1:00:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=3645s) you know they rolled out this biometric system right for payment of all about the welfare benefits and so on yes and it's been a privacy disaster right because you know the state has sovereign authority over 1.4 billion people and they're pretty good at scaling things across their entire territory and when they get it right it's fantastic and we get wrong it's a disaster um and india has such terrible problems with corruption you know all the places that were ruled by empires corruption becomes a civic duty you know um if you are you know in a country and you're colonized and they're extracting wealth from your country everything which operates by the book and everything which is honest serves the imperial masters and everything which is decadent and corrupt and hides money and steals from the tax ban and so on all of that stuff while you are still under occupation is a civic duty right and you see this in all of the countries which were heavily colonized and and and is there a time by which this this habit that has been evidently ingrained and and adopted uh uh one would expect uh has has a half-life or or has kind of it wanes or it doesn't well i mean the indians have had independence since what was it 48 yeah still one of the world's most corrupt societies ireland has independence since i don't know when the irish independence was i want to say it was about the same time maybe a little earlier 28 maybe for ireland i should know this right apologies to the irish people i should know but i don't you know ireland is still fabulously corrupt greece right fabulously corrupt south america fabulously corrupt you know so and is the blockchain gonna help with that at all well this is the question right so if the indian adoption and the general global adoption of the blockchain takes the areas where things are reasonably clean and gradually expands them in size there's a decent chance that it will be an anti-corruption technology right but if it's taken too large too quickly so that the blockchain penetrates the society faster than the society can become less corrupt the prospect is that what we get is the blockchain is used as a fuel for corruption rather than as a cure for corruption and that to be fair really kind of worries me because if you take a corrupt system and you just inject blockchain into it now you have a corrupt system

[1:03:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=3795s) with a blockchain whereas if you take a relatively clean system and use the blockchain to clean it the rest of the way and then gradually you scale it maybe it's possible to kind of widen the circle of light until you've got you know quite a well-established sort of social contract that this part of the system is not corrupt and this is the hope for Mattereum i mean we have a world-class anti-motor and slavery expert on board we have a very good environmental leader we're currently in the process of onboarding a friend of mine who is going to take eleanor rostrom's work on the commons and start figuring out how that how we apply ostrom's work you know she won a nobel prize for commons management staff so we're going to start to find officers work to handle the circular economy aspect right so you know we take the thing with the sticker and it's being sold and it's being moved around and around and around right this thing is now in some sense in a commons yes and we take austrum's work on governing commons and we apply that to the circular economy because how else would you run a certain economy uh dominic's uh helping out uh ireland in 1922. thank you dominic i lived in ireland for a year i knew that uh so uh vinay this uh was really uh wonderful and uh really good luck with Mattereum uh even though you have already achieved a lot but the uh mission is uh so ambitious that uh still you have exponentially more uh in in front of you [Music] practical solutions that's right that's right very good very good but uh you your thinking of course uh uh is is very deep as well so i hope uh you will join us uh uh sometime in the future to give us both an update on what is going on uh with uh Mattereum as well as uh in the various implications because uh uh you are as well as i very much er looking forward to see how blockchain delivers its promise to build a better world thank you thank you very much for being with us today thank you david and thank you everyone for watching thank you for uh watching uh today's episode of uh what is new in the world

[1:05:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=3945s) of uh blockchain uh we will be back uh in a couple of weeks uh with uh a new guest talking about dao's uh specifically and how the impact of daos uh hopefully is going to enable us uh to coordinate and arrive to consensus not only with a thousand or a million but maybe billions of participants uh because those are the challenges that we are all facing today thank you [Music]

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End of [678] WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with 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, [790](https://guptaoption.com/texts/790.md) 'Mattereum is Blockchain Cypherpunk' (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.