# Vinay Gupta on identity, starting a fund, internet court system & dominant blockchains

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [713]. 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, 2018-03-28 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PcdR6-0kHk. Text: automatic captions, mostly 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): Dispute-resolution idea in passing.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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)
  - Hexayurt Capital Partners (2016): Talk on a new venture model: startups as factories for financial instruments, entrepreneurs as the scarce... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Crypto compliance & money laundering (50%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (25%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: ICO (2 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); refugee camps (2 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); The DAO (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); platforms (3 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); DAO (1 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); KYC (1 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); digital identity (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); refugees (2 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); tokenization (1 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); dispute resolution (1 here; 48 sources in all, earliest dated 2013)
- Importance: core-text score 0.15 (1.00 is the top), number 424 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [565] [Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
  - [555] [Breaking Down Real World Assets: Crypto Daily, with... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/555.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [637] Mattereum and business on the blockchain I Rob Knight (2018); [726] [Talk by Vinay Gupta at the Blockchaingers Global Digital... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/726.md); [851] [Global governance in the era of blockchain. (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/851.md)
- On the same works, just after: [635] [Ian Grigg (Chamapesa) and Vinay Gupta (Mattereum) on... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/635.md); [633] [Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/633.md); [631] [The economic impact of blockchain - Panel at the second... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/631.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: Vinay Gupta on identity, starting a fund, internet court system & dominant blockchains, video, 2018-03-28, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PcdR6-0kHk; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [713], https://guptaoption.com/texts/713.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PcdR6-0kHk&t=0s) we're here at the Swiss ico summit and I'm talking here to Victoria a Gupta and he's gonna be in a panel together with me but talking about a fund and he comes from is the old hippy he comes from the internet world he comes from the crypto world Burning Man is in his in your past and you started a fund of funds are you excited to fund the crypto fund how does the crypto fun doing well so we started as a VC right about a year ago and we came to the conclusion that the assets were already overpriced it's a crazy time because everything went up five times in one year and you know you actually the economic fundamentals it was hard to see how this is gonna pay so at this point we decided we would rather be on the buy side for money than the cell site for money because if that meant that our valuation would be quite high and we'd have an easy time fundraising and so we started basically a Supreme Court of the Internet in the form of a commercial dispute resolution system called Mattereum so material is the modern crypto Court yes exactly right but you can put it into there you can put it into smart contracts if you have a problem York your company or your organization is going to be the arbitrator exactly but this is very simple commercial arbitration so though we use phrases like supreme court of the internet to explain it to people and truth it's using the same commercial arbitration agreements to handle hundreds of billions of dollars of real business it takes like shipping and construction it's a very standard model but for new technology and it grounds the crypto right into the real world in a very new way and who are the people who are doing these kinds of these kinds of judgments very experienced technical barristers in the UK and the two people that are kind of senior advisors on the are and the two most qualified people in the UK to do that kind of work and the UK is a global Centre for that kind of work so we're very very deeply grounded in the existing commercial experience with Vinay you are really known you started with the Ethereum group you've been in Delhi you've helped with all kinds of refugees that they are doing but this sounds extraordinary commercial it is extraordinarily commercial turns out the paying for refugee camps is really expensive and you go do commercial stuff to make the money to pay for the refugee camps so that's what we're doing where you even made a tent right you made a tent well I made a thing called the heck's a yurt but you spill all over burning mom to build a you know but we tried to get it into a commercial industry to you know be built all around the world for Refugees turns out that requires more capital when I was able to access so

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PcdR6-0kHk&t=150s) here I am fighting the capital development and what happened that because I mean you are at the original FF area Matthew makes got lots of ether so what happened with that at well so at the DAO crisis I divested because I no longer felt confident that I understood the legal position I was in and the legal advice was you can talk or you can hold but you can't do both say the five hundred thousand very very you got I think is right fourteen right but I'm I made that decision I knew is here to cost me tens of millions of dollars right in the position where you've got a choice between the free practice of your trade in a booming economy or having to keep your mouth shut for regulatory reasons it seems like the wise thing to do was that the full range of commercial flexibility so glad actually go build critical infrastructure that mattered rather than being stuck as a passive investor I wanted to lead from the front lines and that's the decision I made very good I mean lots of integrity what is your vision for the next couple of years in the craziness where we are now what do you see crypto play as a role in society I think we're gonna Marge Lisi at Fiat coins and a very strong regulation of anonymous currency I think we're gonna way not mainstreamed into the financial industry whether we like her or not and the harder we fight that the harder they're gonna hit us and the other thing is I think we're going to see the tokenization not of existing property rights but of entirely new classes of property rights so my emphasis is on the creation of new kinds of property not by government Fiat in the way that you would with say copyright but in the way that for example derivatives were created by contract so the use of contract law to create new classes of property I think is going to be the real crypto explosion and we are will be in the very very earliest days of that process and you think that the currency part of it paying for everything will be heavily regulated and will be eliminated I think what you're gonna see is dollar coins and euro coins issued by the central banks on to blockchains and then going through a series of hands in the banking system to individuals I really don't think that the idea of independently issued global currencies is going to survive unless the crypto community cuts to deal with for example the UN or the World Bank so if the ITU became the global crypto regulator using the same Authority need an international authority to be able to get an international payment system oh this is the Prudential yet this is a potential now I don't know for sure which way that will go but it seems to me that the ITU is the logical regulator and we just have to wait and see how it all pans out

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PcdR6-0kHk&t=300s) then if we look at the the ICO so which we currently have you know you saw that everything get went up like crazy how do you look at that world what face are we in and how fast ball that's correct itself well I mean welcome to the late-1990s right I was a tech in the late 1990s the dot-com bubble I believe topped out somewhere around six trillion dollars so we're only a what 20% 1/5 percent right one twentieth the size of the dot-com bubble so at that point I don't think the bubble is really even started yet but but this time we know it's a bubble right we are experienced enough to know that 99% these assets will be worthless and a handful of them will turn into Amazon eBay Facebook and I would not like to be an investor in that environment if you look at your favorite platform Imperium and you look at Bitcoin and you look at all the other platforms do you see them going somewhere what are they going to be the dominant crypto platforms well for every platform the defining characteristic is not what it does today it's how faster innovates the innovation is very more important than the starting point I know you've seen that with for example white coin has innovated really really quickly and has become more and more respectable as a result the faster you innovate the battery gets over time so I don't think the existing platforms are renovating particularly faithfully that leaves lots of opportunity for newcomers to come in but it's really all gonna come down to who innovates fastest and I don't know how you designed a crypto platform for continuous innovation there fear we are doing it but I don't know what that way is what about your old pal out of the Ethereum Cardona the guy is Charles they're doing a lot of very very high quality engineering what will happen legally what will happen in will they get mass adoption I don't know five years from now where will you be well by then I'm hoping to be up to my eyeballs building new cities in the developing world but I suspect that's gonna be more like 15 years well I mean one of the things I saw is that identity services could start there because I mean a lot of these people have no identity no digital identity do you see a purpose for that for that group of people that it could be a launching group well there's two places you could start you could start with the ultra-rich or you can start with very poor generally speaking I think most of the innovation really comes to melt for rich right cell phone calls used to be $6 a minute and it was movie executives in LA the realtors are paid for that industry so I

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PcdR6-0kHk&t=450s) think that really the ultra high-net-worth are the people who are most inconvenienced by modern kyc I think of the lobbying power to cut through so once you make it work for the ultra high-net-worth which the banks are very eager to fix then what comes out of that is a transformation where the laws are change the regulations to change the paradise are changed then you could get that stuff fish down to the poor if you start with the poor what will happen is you'll get so far and then the regulator it'll just feel like wait what and then you'll hit trouble so I generally favored launching customers for the two billion port well I mean you can try but what will happen is you'll get a couple hundred million users and then the government will get really heavily involved so my gut feeling about all of this is unfortunately and I don't like saying it but the cellphone model is the only thing we've shown to really work and that means get it right for the rich and the poor before will it be having an A panel in about an hour and a half and there you'll see group that talk about this more so be there and come back

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End of [713] Vinay Gupta on identity, starting a fund, internet court system & dominant blockchains. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [635](https://guptaoption.com/texts/635.md) Ian Grigg (Chamapesa) and Vinay Gupta (Mattereum) on... (2018); the most closely related, [565](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md) Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.