# The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [717]. 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, 2021-08-20 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw. 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): Mattereum press.
- 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)
  - 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)
  - 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:
  - 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)
  - 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: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (55%); Crypto history, e-gold & digital money (18%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: NFT (30 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); Singapore (4 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Digital Catapult (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); Mattereum (9 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); IPFS (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); real estate (4 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated); USDC (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); stablecoin (1 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); Swarm (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); transaction costs (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2009)
- Importance: core-text score 0.27 (1.00 is the top), number 287 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [555] [Breaking Down Real World Assets: Crypto Daily, with... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/555.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [554] [RWA for Emerging Markets (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/554.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [733] [Trust models, founding Mattereum, and 'Turning Law into... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/733.md); [768] [#03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md); [773] [Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md)
- On the same works, just after: [762] [MetaGame meets Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/762.md); [791] [COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md); [793] [COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.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: The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum, video, 2021-08-20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [717], https://guptaoption.com/texts/717.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=0s) [Music] so vinay it gives me great pleasure to have you as a guest on our new um uh videocast podcast whatever it is the november insightful um and in this in this series we're delving into all the weird and wonderful things in crypto d5 nft world and and uh um you're suddenly one of the people in this industry who's uh educated me um you did a great series of talks uh in in london that i'll always remember many years ago well way back when when uh when icos were a thing and uh we hadn't turned them into automated market making token listings or whatever they are about yeah but uh the um anyway vinay um how are you how is Mattereum still always one of the most uh innovative projects in this market uh um how are things going uh things are pretty good um you know Mattereum has had this very very long long long dragging r d process right this is now year four of operations um and you know we launched the first product right the beginning of the pandemic and it just got swamped by the pandemic you know nothing happened uh we want the second product which is the kind of nft product uh earlier this year and we've gotten to the point where we could go from a standing start to producing an nft for a physical object in a week first contact customer through to here's your nft it's on alternate open see in a week uh and at that point you know that's like a real deployable capability we can do that for anything that will fit into our storage uh it doesn't always take a week because some things are more complicated than others but the base case is now like it's quick it's professional it's slick uh i always don't know what to do with it it's like yeah when did we that's incredible especially you know this is uh especially beautiful to me because i spent a lot of time with vinay in the late part of last year early part of this year when it was uh a squeaky mvp that that you could

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=150s) debate as to whether it would launch or not it was yeah it was twitchy because i mean at that point right in the depths of crypto winter it's hard to get people to think in innovative ways for one thing and then on the other side of it i mean it's just there's nothing like practice you know like you know the fourth the fifth the sixth time that you're doing the same operation this set of legal paperwork this set of smart contracts this securitorial standards and you know we do the dance of integrating all those pieces inside a Mattereum and then it clicks boom here's your nft you know by the time that we'd had the team doing that in a repeated way for relatively simple objects we got to the point where you know it just becomes a process you know same input same output same people in the middle um and i think that it's globally unique that we've got this capability to do this streamlined issuance of physical assets as nfts i don't think anybody's anywhere close to that um because it turns out to be a really hard problem um and it's a little bit like i mean it's a bit like making a swiss watcher or something right each individual component is relatively simple but it's the coordination of all the components that gives you the the actual uh process

[3:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=226s) amazing so i i was just on your website ahead of this interview and i i scrolled down to the bottom very happily normal looking website and i came across the julian handbags at the bottom which i absolutely loved i just thought what a wonderful way of showcasing what you're doing and and you can buy it for a little bit more than two ethereum i have to admit i was tempted to even try and do the process before doing this interview i may well do it before this podcast goes live but anyway the the um uh yeah fantastic so how does it work if i am uh the buyer of a julian handbags nft what do i do what do i actually own the handbags you actually own the handx so we bought the handx from a reputable dealer we've validated that it was as described and that is as legit as we know how to make it um and we take that bundle of documentation of that whole process and we put it into ipfs so it can't be edited and there's a permanent record of it right then the physical hondax goes into a secure insured storage facility in london so they're an art storage facil facility and they can handle objects up to tens of millions of dollars of value without blinking they do all the time um and then we issue the nft which is basically a warehouse receipt that gives you the legal right to retrieve the honda from us and as soon as you buy that nft you're the legal owner of the ax it's your incredible and can i use the nft to get hold of the handx so you basically return the nfg to Mattereum who look the nft so isn't it isn't voided because you might want to put the handx back into the system and then we instruct the art vault to ship you the axe wow simple as that uh and we this is the same arrangement with the gold bars in singapore so we have a similar set up in singapore with our partners loco and loco can handle anything up to a 400 ounce bar for 700k so we could very soon see nfts that were for either an individual 700 ounce bar or maybe even a fleet of 700 ounce bar 400 ounce bars and every single bar has a unique number on it because these are allocated bars

[6:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=376s) um and it's the same deal right you turn up in singapore they hand you the gold or they ship it to you and you pay some taxes wow

[6:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=384s) hats off to you and they i think you've i can tell uh like if it's not going into too much detail but i probably have done 30 meetings with vinay with different people and some of the smartest investors in the planet and various different sort of advisory types and i think every single one of them pretty much came out and went this guy is clearly a genius but they were all highly skeptical that the very process that you're describing that you're able to do right now would actually work right and it's look it's airtight right in as much as the gaps in the process are covered by insurance you know what happens if the warehouse burns down and the hand ox is destroyed by the heat right more of a risk for your dolly painting than for a hand axe but you know what if that happens well there's insurance for that right you know what happens if you know the ethereum main chain goes down for some reason right there's some apocalyptic software event oh my god the train is down well how do we figure that out well you just walk in you go to arbitration and you prove that you've got possession of the crypto key you know what if you lose your key what if your keys are stolen you know there are failovers for all of these things and in the next six weeks maybe um we are going to add political risk insurance uh as a warranty that is going to be powered by an outfit called unn.finance right so unn has this risk pooling method right you introduce this to unm and they have this risk pooling method and they are perfectly comfortable setting up risk tools for things like what happens if the country that is holding your gold gets invaded so you know we're going to go from this relatively clean you know uh pedestrian you know one nft one hadax to one nft swarm of specialized insurance products all which are backed by d5 commercial lenders who will take the insured nft and then lend you money against it you know the whole thing is just going to plug physical assets right into the d5 ecosystem and we've got the physical asset part done and right now we're working on the d5 connectors so so so i feel like i've played a small part in history in this way because the the um two of my favorite and still probably underrated projects in in the crypto

[8:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=534s) landscape of our Mattereum and unn just because it really takes you know we speak exactly the same language they are fantastic partners for us because we all speak this language of risk and you know you can imagine like by the time that you can get a whole bunch of super specialized micro insurance or micro warranty products from you know the d5 world what that produces is yield farming by people staking their money behind kind of things like political risk if you don't think that let's say singapore is going to get invaded by malaysia in the next two years you stake a bunch of money behind that and you just rake in income from all of the payments that people are taking to get access to that risk pool yeah right no it's um it really is um the great thing i think about the the crypto and tech space generally but crypto and blockchain especially is is most of the people we know renee in our space are probably living five years in the future most of the time right you and mike beck for example are two of the people who sort of know where the world is going and and ironically i look at this and the planet arrakis we will be there soon but the uh yeah actually that's a picture of new york that's a picture of uh futuristic new york amazing

[10:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=629s) really really interesting and i think this is actually a good segue because i think um just three years ago i i remember very very clearly you sort of uh stood up in in in this sort of king's cross lecture hall uh digital catapult and took a took out your phone and when soon you will be able to go along the street and i think you pointed at sort of uh some pancreas or whatever and go you can take a photo of a nice house by sink pancreas and then you will be able to buy the the house right um how close are we to that happening right now now the material stuff is up and running where are we i believe we're going through a parking space in london in q3 amazing uh and the reason for doing a parking space is really nothing can go wrong with the parking space it's not like you need a surveyor's report you know you don't really need title insurance i think we could do a transaction for something that was at the simplest end of real estate in q3 q4 early next year i think we will get nfts for real real estate transactions amazing you may say like why do people want that right isn't that just a bunch of crypto rich people that could just turn their money into fear and buy the house of fear and the answer is no what you're really looking for in that use case is um somebody takes their money and turns it into something like usdc right you my expectations real estate will be pretty much entirely stablecoin transactions and what you want is the ability to immediately close a house deal so uh i'm gonna move to london i'm gonna buy this house the house i'm gonna buy falls through i say right well i've already got all my financing arranged i'm going to buy a different house but i need to be able to close the transaction in a week right and that ability to just literally browse through all the houses that are currently represented as NFTs click the one that you like the look of you know buy an option on it that will hold it open for three days how you confirm that everybody involved is comfortable with that property then you pull the trigger make the crypto payment and immediately receive the nft that gives you the legal ownership of the house you know that as a process inside of the whole world of real estate

[12:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=779s) is the the catcher mechanism so that every time something goes wrong you just get a hold of one of these nfts as we've immediately filled in the gap that opens up and say a mortgage chain right it's not just hey you know i've got a bunch of bitcoin my house on the blockchain because it's cool it's i need to close on a property in a week what can you do for me incredible and i mean i say a week right the technical part of that is going to be literally the same as buying any other nft you could settle the thing in a minute the assumption is you're going to want to do things like escrow where you can hold the thing in place using a smart contract while you verify that everybody on your side of the deal is comfortable with it you know does your wife think that this property is suitable well i've got an option on it and we now have a week to make our minds up and if we confirm the transaction we'll take the house and you know incredible 100 how long you have that option open for right same thing for collateralized blending i have the nft the only way of attaching a lien or something like that to the house is through the nft i walk the nft over to somebody doing collateralized lending they check what the place sold for five times before me and they immediately lend in a day right in the same block if they're going to be really aggressive about this so you know the the objective here is not just to provide services to the crypto world the objective here is to provide crypto services to the real world

[14:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=868s) amazing amazing and what's your take on the whole nft space i mean still um interestingly also out of the uk probably the closest project that i know to Mattereum seems to be currency right like um um uh what's your take on that i i think it's a really cool idea but i'd love to we have been having an internal discussion about whether we should do like a marketing campaign that just says Mattereum currency as a service right because you know what they've built is they've built their own kind of hacked version of Mattereum inside to try and create this thing where you've got a physical digital bridge inside of the currency project but they haven't really un you know looked at that as like hey you could do this for anything right and let's unpack for listeners as well so currency effectively is a damien hurst project where he effectively has auctioned all these nfts it's probably been one of the most successful nft sales uh this year uh in the they they auctioned off 10 000 nfts for two thousand pounds or something like that and uh all probably have gone up five to ten to plus to probably a hundred x in value because they're effectively burning that there's an option in the currency nft fit very specifically to a damien hirst painting and then what i love about it is the game theory that they baked into it where they've added in uh effectively at a two two-month time period you need to either choose to keep the nft and uh abandon your chances of owning a damien hurst painting or um or on the other hand receive the damien earth painting so quite a brilliant idea what we really ought to do is we'll run a service for people that did the currency to where by they can take physical delivery of the painting then walk it over to us we put it in the vault and then we give them back an energy i i i think i i know someone who's who has managed to get free of those so he may be in touch with you if you well that would be amazing because you know i mean the point is that it's meant to be fungible you know hearst has created this illusion that it's a binary choice between the nft and the physical thing it's not there are two phases of the same object right the object is free in the world there is no nft the object is locked in

[16:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=1018s) a vault there is an nft simple that is brilliant i love it i love it let's do it it will be nice i will um and and he's a trader so he will love this there we go yeah what are we going to do we're going to subvert the intention of baby and hurt but you should get fts for copies of the currency store to revolt perfect that's exactly the kind of thing that we're allowing you for toby exactly yeah it's like do you want to buy a house in acapulco with bitcoin i could help you sort that out yeah i mean you know that's exactly the kind of transaction that you'd do as an nft if it was available right so if somebody had already turned their house and acapulco into an nft that client just comes along and buys the nft yeah that'll do two swimming pools fine bing done right yeah yeah yeah you know imagine how the world looks if you have this friction free environment where you know most of the kinds of because if everything starts with luxury goods right unfortunately the world wherein if you want to do innovation you're going to wind up initially selling to either the very rich or the very poor and the very poor do not have crypto wallets so you know the notion that we could build out this zero friction ecosystem where everything is carbon compensated and you've got offsets for all your transactions and you know that entire thing you build it for the ultra rich you build it for the collectors you build it for the art people and then once all of that works you know it's no longer the you know house on acapulco is an nft you know it's the two bedroom at barnet and you know what started out as a convenience and a luxury for the very rich becomes ultra low transaction costs and total predictability which is exactly what you need for the working class yeah well uh vinay it's been an incredible sort of podcast interview uh thank you very much uh i think we could go on for another few hours but we're trying to keep these short sharp and uh stimulating so so we can uh uh follow up and catch up with you in several months time when no doubt the Mattereum project will have evolved even further and the nft and crypto space will become even crazier leaps and bounds leaps and bounds really good seeing you yeah good to see you mate so uh hope you enjoyed it yeah absolutely

[19:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSU8OSA9Kw&t=1168s) [Music] you

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End of [717] The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [762](https://guptaoption.com/texts/762.md) MetaGame meets Vinay Gupta (2021); the most closely related, [555](https://guptaoption.com/texts/555.md) Breaking Down Real World Assets: Crypto Daily, with... (2024); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.