# "10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA Experts Vinay Gupta & Ray Buckton discuss (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [722], 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, 2025-07-29 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step.
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Recent view on ledger and asset layers.
- 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)
  - 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)
  - 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)
- Ideas developed here: Programmable Blockchains in Context
- Topics: Ethereum — launch, release process & programmable blockchains (45%); Bitcoin, libertarianism & the state (18%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: formal verification (9 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); IPFS (5 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); tokenization (9 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); real estate (20 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated); world computer (3 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Swarm (5 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Mist (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Programmable Blockchains in Context (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); USDC (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); RWA (3 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2017)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): GENIUS Act
- Importance: core-text score 0.32 (1.00 is the top), number 222 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- On the same works, just before: [521] [The Next Industrial Revolution of AI & Blockchain (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/521.md); [522] [Fiat Assets vs Self Sovereign Assets (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/522.md); [523] [When TradFi Enters DeFi (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/523.md)
- On the same works, just after: [507] [Product Information Markets (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/507.md); [508] [Mars Tokens (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/508.md); [509] [Minitel, MiCA and Blockchain Regulation (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/509.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: "10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA Experts Vinay Gupta & Ray Buckton discuss, video, 2025-07-29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [722], https://guptaoption.com/texts/722.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=2250s) text. It's immutable 3,000 years. You'll show me a human show Ethereum contract that will last 3,000 years. Um, you have signatures, you got payment, you got promise. So, signatures are now digital signatures. The payment is Ether or USDC or something along those kind of lines. Where does the promise go? Right? Because you can't have an immediate settlement system where like it's an NFT. I put my money into the smart contract and what I get back is ideally a legal license for a piece of intellectual property or maybe I'm purchasing an artwork and it's got the same rules as digital art. Those are all fuzzy kind of like that, right? But that's essentially a vending machine model. You're not really creating the contract. You're simply exchanging money for goods and it's an immediate transaction. The element of there's a delay and it's a future promise about future behavior is a thing that kind of makes a contract complex. So, we're in a position where there is no standardized way of storing the contract for an Ethereum transaction, right? You guys did the transaction. Well, I gave them the money. Where's the paperwork? And there's no standard answer to that question. Right? Now, you think what? But actually, right, you know, you could have had a version of Ethereum where there was a standard parameter that was passed in a transaction that was a pointer to an IPFS folder and in the IPFS folder. Or I mean, do you remember what was it going to be called? Swarm. I think Ethereum was going to have its own version of IPFS. That was something that was on the foundation road map for a while. I don't think ever happened. >> It sounds familiar. Yeah. >> Yeah. There was Ethereum Swarm and there was a short messaging system that was called, I think, Whisper maybe. So the things that we thought were going to get built was there was swarm, there was whisper and there was mist. So mist was the secure application browser. I think it was swarm as the large block and then the short messaging service I think was whisper. None of that really happened in the way that we thought it was going to. I think those projects all got some degree of progress on them. I have a feeling that Swarm is actually still around. I'm trying to remember the name of the programmer that was working on it. I seem to remember he was Hungarian. His name is slipping my mind. I feel terrible about that because I hang out with him when he's in London, but I haven't seen him in a while. So, in any case, um you know, you you have an exchange of money for a promise of services. In our case, we just make a pointer into IPFS, right? Fine. What is an IPFS? A structured network of legal

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=2400s) contracts which divide up the risk of the transaction into modules. different people are attached to each module and they're the people whose money is underwriting the transaction. So what that allows is for the creation of a modular contract structure and the reason that that works is because you could take a single stream of money going into the smart contract and you can split it out into a set of different slices. So if we want to sign 24 people signing a single contract, even if you use docuign, it's going to take three weeks to get the last signature on it. But the joy of Ethereum, all the people that need to pre-sign pre-sign. When everybody has pre-signed, then customers can come in one at a time, buy by by. And every single one of those people gets paid a slice out the smart contract. >> And that as a structure creates essentially a vending machine type relationship between buyers and sellers. But now you could have two dozen people in the transaction. Mhm. >> And that's gamechanging because it basically takes one or two orders of magnitude out of the complexity of executing complex contractual protocols. >> So if we want to exchange real estate, that's a contractual protocol. It's got many many different people involved. There's a lot of different paper to sign. We modularize that contractual protocol. We break those things out into smart contracts. We then have a payment mechanism where we just slam an enormous slab of cash in at one end and then the entire contractual protocol operates. Everybody gets paid what they need to get paid. The buyer receives uh all the guarantees and the proofs that they require from all the different people involved and then they walk out with the token which is the deed to a house and it's literally just kaching bang and the entire process runs as an atomic swap. And you sort of think like atomic swap for real estate that sounds like it ought to be worth something and indeed I would agree that it should. >> Absolutely. It's that's very interesting because it does beg the question for me and I know we've had this discussion previously. Um just making the comparison right to what they did in the Netherlands that you shared with me a number of months ago. The Netherlands just took all their property data and put it um on a computer. They digitized it. Now, they didn't put it on chain, but they did digitize it, thereby making it at least reasonably easy to query from a a reputable source. Here in the US, all of the property data is run on, you know, GIS kind of system. Like, it's it's very lumpy, frumpy, and sometimes it's just written on the back of a

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=2550s) napkin that, you know, Jim sold it to Bob back in 1976. Um, maybe was never updated to the county clerk. So, it makes it very challenging. I'm curious, Ben, based on, you know, this sounds like a future I would like to live in. It makes things easier. That's for sure. And definitely less um fraudrone you could say. What are some of the primitives that need to be in place in order for this to be viable, right? I'm sort of assuming gold may be easier to to have this kind of system than real estate, for example. >> Oh, I mean, it's it's done. It works, right? I mean, you know, like we've we did our first real estate listing probably three years ago. We've done gold bars. We've done fine art. Uh I'm currently working on a project which is uh a a relatively large publicly traded company that has um many hundreds or maybe low thousands of units of real estate that they're pushing through this system right now. You know that's kind of a bit of a gamecher because once that's done it's then possible to look around at the rest of the world and be like oh now we do everything else. Okay. you know, because, you know, once you've done your first, you know, couple of billion dollars of real estate with some kind of licensed agreement on hanging off the back of it, you know, at that point, you know, the first couple billion dollars worth of real estate is the hardest. Um, and once that is successfully concluded and we can actually talk about it and show people what we've done, I think everybody will be like, "Oh my god, you spent eight years and that was what you were doing?" Yes, you did say that's what you were doing. Yes. We didn't really believe it was possible. So we never really quite understood why nothing else seemed to be happening. Yeah, that that's because the first billion is the hardest. Ah, right. Because it's a threshold function, right? Once you can show people, look, >> you know, these 500 people over there bought use of real estate on a commercial basis using the Ethereum blockchain and this is how their tokens worked. And that same mechanism will work for anything. You know, it requires a pretty substantial demonstrator to break the paradigm from what to whoa. And we're still in a position where like for all the tokenization that's happening, people really are still not into the domain where they can imagine that you just do everyday stuff using tokens. >> Oh, what are we doing? Oh, we're buying a house. How are we doing it? USDC to a deed token. And where does that happen? Oh, well, there's a there's an exchange. Oh, and it does USDC tokens. Yeah. How do we know it works? Well, here's the insurance policies. Here's the

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=2700s) warranties. Here's the gist. Here's, you know, >> oh, well, my cousin's a lawyer. Could we have a could we have a look over this before he does it? And, you know, cousin the lawyer takes a look over and comes out and like, well, I mean, it's it's it's all there. Obviously, the old system is a lot more uh yeah, you'll probably be fine, right? And you know, at that point where your cousin, the lawyer, looks at it and says, "Yeah, that's probably that's all right. I think you can do that." And at that point you wind up with mass adoption in domains like real estate because everybody is horribly served by the existing real estate mechanisms. >> And you know I would much rather see a world in which Ethereum dominated real estate than a world in which Ethereum traded the trading of shop uh dominated the trading of stocks and bonds because we've already got electronic trading for stocks and bonds. You know what I want to see is electronic trading to real estate because real estate is a mess. We desperately need real estate to get easier and cheaper to deal with. You know, let's solve some natural human problems here. And the number one problem for most people is why am I paying 6% on the price of a house and why is my landlord a bozo if I'm renting? You know what? Let's you know, the only other thing we can do that would be higher social value than fixing real estate is fixing healthcare. Mhm. >> And you know, I'm a magician, but I'm not that good a magician. >> No, it seems like >> it seems like real estate's a lower hanging fruit than healthcare. That's for sure. Healthcare is its own gordion not to be solved. >> Oh, so I mean like I would love it if we could get to healthare as well, but you know like I'm going to start with the thing that I think I can solve. Uh I mean I'm I'm from a medical family. My father was a doctor and a research scientist in bio. And you know at some level it'd be really really nice if we could do something about medicine but the level of paradatic change that you would have to make to fix medicine you know it's it's just so heavily regulated real estate I think is a solable problem now medicine maybe after the AI systems have eaten all of the medical records all the scientific papers and correlated them and we get a new generation of AI based medicine maybe we could start talking about tokenizing that because at that point you could get like really good statistical estimates of the probability that various treatments actually work in a way that we currently don't because the studies aren't large enough. I mean, it's there's a thing waiting to be done, but I think it's going to take five years for the AIS to come through and break medicine and then

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=2850s) we can remake it in a rational form. Real estate, man, we're ready for business now. Like, you could just bang on our door and say, "Hey, could you please tokenize a thing?" We can do that for you. Yes, sir. >> Absolutely. >> You have to do it yourself, but we can help you get there. >> Right. So, it's also the world's largest asset class at 300 trillion, right? And I mean we were discussing previously the uh the case that occurred recently against the National Realtors Association saying that 6% flat fee was considered a you know a monopoly and so that's something you feel like oh there's a the trust was busted as has happened back in the early 1900s right um that that's it was a monopoly so it's a very interesting thing to see that that kind of shifting um and so that's I got to say just from this this conversation bene you know one hour we already got two uh two major pieces you and I have to co-author we got to do the political science one regarding the crypto fascism and anarchism. We got to do the from from what to the uh the breakdown of what it takes to get there um for the mind of the average person. So there's two pieces right there. Um >> and you know why shouldn't we solve these problems, right? I mean there's nothing about this that says that it has to be hard, >> you know, like when we get down to these questions about the political science of the blockchain and how all those pieces work like that doesn't have to be nightmarishly complex. That's just a thing where we sit down and we can figure it out, >> you know, >> right? >> Like it's not it's not like we have to invent the political science from scratch. Pre-existing political theory ought to be able to cover almost all of this. It's just almost nobody's done the work because the entire the entire political landscape on the blockchain got centralized by the randroids and so libertarianism became the official operating system of the blockchain. But, you know, libertarian markets are supposed to be no force, no fraud, and the blockchain is nothing but bloody fraud. You know, even that hasn't been solved yet. Come on, guys. >> Absolutely. And my friend Boris said, you know, if if your entire modus operandi is to come in here and dunk on retail, then he said it said it in a way, you can kindly f off. You can kindly not be here because that's not the kind of thing that this uh this technology is made for. But not only is it not what it's made for, but it's not the best application of it. It's like having a hammer. Guys, this is really great. We can drive nails. And then you go and you start hitting a cat with it. Terrible. That's not what it's for. You're doing it completely wrong. Yes, you can use it for that, but one, no. Two, why? Um, and three, it's just it's just a poor application in general compared to its um optimal utility. Um, which does make a question actually. I really wanted to kind of circle back to

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=3000s) to the Ethereum question because I know we're coming up on time here and I'm really curious because you've been closer to the fire than than anyone. Um, and the work you're doing, you know, at Mattereum is is phenomenal for ushering in this next 10 years with a clear rights and warrants for the underlying asset. Do you see Ethereum remaining the predominant smart contract network for the next 10 years? I know we we've dogged on Salana and the fact that Trump is is indeed uh found his home there with his memecoin. Um but do you think maybe that Salana is, you know, a little bit faster, it kind of makes more sense for people to be able to issue their own funny little tokens. Do you think that could supplant Ethereum as a dominant smart contract network? >> Um no, but right. So, um, here I I'm going to do the classic thing of opening up the the largest can of worms in the entire game five minute for five minutes before the end of the call. Um, everybody fundamentally misunderstands what Ethereum is good at, right? Ethereum is a plug-in replacement for DNS, right? When you process a transaction on Ethereum, the process that you're doing is not that different from buying a domain name. You pay money for listing in a permanent public database that will be there until the end of time and it'll be globally replicated across a network of computers. We do not need to put purchases of candy bars on that basis, right? We just don't. So the big problem we have is that Ethereum is not great at transactions. Like the mechanism is fantastic for storing the existence of an object. This is a 100 acres of Montana. It has been there for two and a half billion years. It's going to be there for another 7 billion billion years. That's our property. That is a great thing to put on a permanent globally replicated database. There is the property. Which specific humanoid has the right to live in the third apartment on the fourth building on the second quad of the fourth tier of the third piece of real estate in building six. Who that is? That changes all the time. So why do we need a permanent global record of who was ever there forever, right? So what we kind of need is a sliding window of the current things which are important against the fundamentally permanent backing rate. The fact that an asset exists should go on the Ethereum main

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=3150s) chain. Who is currently in an asset and who owns equity in an asset and what is represented by the asset and all the rest of that stuff, that stuff ought to be essentially in a cache, which is a timeexpiring L2 structure, right? So the L2s are basically caches of the current status of the mutable transactions. Once in a while you might have to do a write back before you do something like reorggaging something, but for the for the most part, Ethereum L1 chain space should be for the fact that the real estate exists. And then the L2s should be for things like rentals and leases and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And maybe a mortgage is big enough that you put it in the L1. But the distinction between the L1 and the L2s should be between permanence and transients. And right now we don't have an explicit understanding that the L2 is a cache of the L1. So L2 is fast and transate. L1 uh L1's permanent structure. We've never really gotten clear about the semantics of the difference between the L1 asset register asset identity and the L2 asset ownership, asset fractionalization, asset tokenization. It's a semantic split that nobody hasly made yet. >> No, absolutely. And I think that's a a powerful thought to close out with. Um the reason being we're the next 10 years will kind of identify where Ethereum slots in as you know the world computer. Um whether that is that that sliding time window and how these cachets are L2s ultimately define um what it is and and how it interacts with that kind of base layer. Maybe Salana becomes an L2. We shall see. Um but that's definitely a conversation for a uh another time for sure. A future convo but this has been an absolute pleasure. It's always so much fun to to you know chat with you and I'm glad we can finally do it on a live stream. Definitely looking forward to doing this again in the very near future. Um and let's you and I get to work on that uh kind of political science layout of what the potential future may look like. >> Oh yeah, that'd be fun. Well, next call. >> Love. >> Thanks so much. >> All right, everybody. Take care. Just gonna pop in for like eight seconds and say goodbye. Be sure to follow Ray and Venet and catch you guys all in the next one, guys. appreciate you guys coming on and uh dropping all the expertise. I was just in the background listening. >> Hey, always a pleasure, my friend. Love what you guys are doing at Wolf. And uh yeah, let's keep rocking and rolling. Let's keep building. >> Let's get it.

---
End of [722] "10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA Experts Vinay Gupta & Ray Buckton discuss, 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, [507](https://guptaoption.com/texts/507.md) Product Information Markets (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.