# "10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA Experts Vinay Gupta & Ray Buckton discuss (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [722], part 1 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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=0s) two one and we are live. What's going on everybody? Welcome to Wolf. It's good to see all of you. Really excited to be here today. I'm joined by Ray Buckton and Venet Gupta. Um these are two of our like kind of like our talisman from the RWA tokenization side of Wolf. We've been running these shows for like year and a half or something like that with Ry Ben's been um one of the OG speakers there. definitely remember from the beginning that's back when I lived in Washington like different part of my life and Venet was still there Ray was still there and uh really really excited to come together here talking about tokenization talk about Ethereum a little bit Benet wrote a great paper two years ago programmable blockchains kind of in context here and we're going to be discussing all sorts of stuff but kind of a cool invitation to sort of think of blockchains as like a programmable financial infrastructure and there's all sorts of ways that we can talk about these things and and broaden them out a little bit here into a broader ecosystem kind of programmable money automated logic as well as new asset classes evolving governance needs like whatever people want and whatever people think that may be a use case for Ethereum to fill um there was actually some really really interesting stuff that Vene talked about and so hopefully we're going to be able to dive into that a little bit here with Ray Benet and I'm sure they're going to go in all sorts of different directions in the world of blockchain tokenization so I'll turn it over to the two experts and we'll go from there. So I'm really excited to get into it. Please do retweet the stream if you haven't already and follow these two gentlemen. They're tagged in the title and yeah, excited to get into it. Ray, how's it going, man? >> Going fantastic. Kate, always a pleasure. I always love rocking and rolling with the Wolf crew. You guys get to see my face this time. I used to have a big beard. Now I do not. One thing I still do have is tons of tokenization knowledge. Not as much as the resident guru and expert here, Venet. Venet's been here since the beginning of Ethereum. Man's been talking asset tokenization since uh, you know, before I even knew what a blockchain was. So super excited to be uh here on the 10th anniversary of the Ethereum network. Uh Venet, how are we doing today, my friend? >> Hey, uh well, I mean, as usual, overworked, underpaid, right? >> The perpetual human condition, isn't it? >> Perpetual human condition. That's the one. Uh but yeah, I mean, you know, this has been a real boom year for us because of all the changes in the regulatory states and the states. You know, suddenly everybody is able to do all the things that they always thought they were going to do with Ethereum. you know, we're kind of at that crossing point of like, oh, this is going from like, yeah, one day, one day, one day to now because the SEC is kind of being pushed out the way and we're beginning to get down to a kind of situation where you can actually do the stuff that the technology allows you to because the law

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=150s) after only 10 years is kind of catching up. >> 100% only it only took a decade and so I'm really Yeah, I'm personally super excited being at this like 10-year precipice for, you know, the world's largest smart contract network. And I know you were you were there project managing the launch at the beginning. So uh could we just talk you know briefly over kind of the core problems at the beginning that you believed Ethereum um was being built to solve. I'm really curious to see your perspective there. >> So the the consensus inside of the foundation uh I would say was best represented by a video that Gavin Wood did most of the script work for and most of the visual design for um which was called um Ethereum the world computer. You can still find it on the Foundation's YouTube channel. 90 seconds long. Uh, and it's got the old school kind of gray white, you know, kind of network diagrams moving through the air kind of a thing. It, you know, it's like it's a real sort of apex of the the old school Ethereum look. Um, and that video it's like Ethereum, you're going to use it for financing hospitals, forests, airplanes, trucks, you know, it's all physical assets. There's there's no non-physical tokenization in that story. Everything basically points towards it's going to be used for financing physical assets of all different kinds. And that was that was the pitch. That's what we thought we were building. Um and I you know I still remember the sort of excitement was very much like all of the internal narrative was real world assets. It wasn't that it was some kind of weird esoteric separate domain. It was you know this is going to make financing physical stuff much more efficient than it is now. That was what we were all thinking that that's where we that's where we were. That's what we thought it was. >> Absolutely. And then so that didn't quite evolve um in the short term following the launch as uh maybe you thought it would. And I'm really interested. So you have you have this phenomenal article out there um from 2015. It's programmable blockchains in context 2015 to 2016. Um and it talk in there you talked about a 40-year deep hole of database connectivity. Um how do you see that kind of playing out a decade later? Did Ethereum really fulfill on that connectivity promise at least? >> Um no cold hard fail. So let's talk about the kind of theoretical model. This was a piece that I wrote the morning of the Genesis block, right? So before going into the office, I got up early and I'm like, I should write like a blog post about this. We could sip sick it up on the foundation blog. We

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=300s) should just do this. So I sit down and I write something and it turns out to be about three times longer than I expected to be. Um, and you know, it was just it was an attempt to tell the story of the future. like here's where we're going, right? Um, and it was a riff because I mean you got to remember that I was mid4s when the Genesis block was launched 10 years ago. So I would been 43. I had crypto experience going back into the mid 1990s. So I'd been doing cryptographic applications engineering when I was like 24 25 mid 90s. My first year being paid 100% in digital cash was 1999 and that was goldbacked digital currency. So there was a gold vault and they were issuing tokens off the back of that gold vault. I was being paid in these things. So you know for me when I came to Ethereum I was already 20 years into crypto. >> You know I I Bitcoin to me was like this you know like oh finally somebody's done something interesting with crypto. Wow. you know, but I mean already then, you know, I had more than 10 years of crypto by the time of Bitcoin. So that piece was basically intended to kind of say, look, this is where cryptography has been for decades. This is where the real world is jammed when it comes to using computers. What does it look like for the blockchain to basically solve the platform level problems in how computers and society work together? like you know all these things that you see computers doing that annoy you that don't work properly all of those are technical problems that show up as social problems. If we solve the technical problems we will solve the social problems that go with them. This is how Ethereum is going to fix that. Um and one of the core claims was that we were going to be able to fix the way that large organizations work together by using uh the blockchain and I would say that that has more or less completely failed. I think that that was not what the market wanted and as a result almost all the consortium chains kind of failed and we never saw the explosion of B2B transaction networks on the chain. >> Now was that a technical problem? Is that a regulatory problem? But like the airline industry doesn't have a blockchain. The hotel industry doesn't have a blockchain. The gold industry doesn't have a blockchain. Um they're not solving their B2B collaboration problems using the blockchain. All of that stuff seems to be stalled in the pipe. So that was not the revolution we expected. >> No, that's fair. Definitely um laying

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=450s) the groundwork and uh the build it and they will come kind of situation. Uh I know we talked about previously didn't necessarily unfold. I know you you mentioned before there was a bit of a mushrooming out of um kind of unexpected negative behavior, right? People selling kind of hot air. I like to joke that, you know, I still have my Dentcoin. I haven't gotten my teeth cleaned with it, but that was something that was launched on the network, right? Um but they kind of turned that on its head given that it took an unexpected direction. um maybe we can touch very briefly on some of the positive aspects that that you see kind of arising out of that um just in the previous 10 years of period history. So that so that was the first part of the paper right the first part of programmable blockchains in context says okay large scale B2B organizations synchronizing their computer systems using the blockchain to do it that's going to be huge okay great second part says but what about crowdfunding as a starting point crowdfunding seems pretty simple here's a little smart contract that does crowdfunding you know we've already shown that you can do crowdfunding on the blockchain that's how we funded Ethereum what about crowdfunding using the blockchain That would be a really good starting point. That talk about predictive power, right? That turned out to be what everybody did 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. The entire universe decides that what they're doing is tokenized crowdfunding on Ethereum and Ethereum becomes essentially a crowdfunding platform year after year after year after year, ICO after ICO after ICO after ICO. So we didn't get the large institutions working together over the blockchain, but but what we did get was this unbelievable explosive growth in crowdfunding >> and that definitely seems to be something comparatively exciting, you know, just from my perspective thinking about leveraging like the wisdom of the masses, right? It's like yeah, you're not having large institutions and incumbents utilizing the blockchain yet, but you are having some social awareness spread for for better or worse kind of through this configuration. Um, and one thing you wrote about in in your piece that I found um really interesting that I'm really curious as someone who's non-technical, your perspective on this, you wrote that um, you know, smart contracts would eventually be simpler than modern JavaScript. I'm really curious in terms of how you have seen that experience evolve because as someone who, you know, participated in some ICOs, um, it was comparatively simple, right? It was easy to just send over crypto, receive token. Um, I'm really curious how you've seen the actual like developer experience evolving as well for for Ethereum just over the last 10 years. Yeah. Um, so this I think was a nightmarish miscalculation. If there was a single

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=600s) mistake I think the foundation made, it was the idea that smart contracts were going to be an accessible tool for ordinary programmers to use. Um, because it turns out that ordinary programmers are well geared up for the website is down and they're really poorly geared up for the satellites falling out of the sky. You know, if if you think of the the amount of damage that a smart contract bug can do financially, it's so enormous compared to the normal kinds of damage that you could get from a JavaScript bug. So, you know, what we've seen is basically the wrong kinds of programmers using the wrong kinds of paradigms developing buggy software with gigantic value propositions attached to it, resulting in these catastrophic failures on the hacks. And that I think is really really bad. Like we just really hadn't understood that what we were really talking about is like look this stuff is kind of like air traffic controller software. It's really technical. It's really skilled. The programming languages are kind of inaccessible. They're great for doing formal verification. They're really well set up for theorem provers. You know you can write reliable software with you know like we should have pitched the tooling as you need a PhD to use it. The end result is extremely high quality and extremely predictable. The theorem improver rails are coming along really nicely and by like 2020 it should have been impossible to deploy a smart contract with a bug because everything went over the improvers and we did not build that and frankly neither did anybody else. You know the industry is not dominated by formal verification and frankly that is because we're stupid. Like that is just my god what is the point writing smart contract in a way where you can have a human make an error. It should all be formally verified by now and we just haven't built the tooling. >> Um, can we get in a little bit of a rabbit hole there? >> Oh, absolutely. You know, I'm probably your biggest fan of the rabbit holes. So, >> rabbit holes, right? So, um, how familiar are you with this concept of completeness? >> I'm tenatively familiar. Um, I know you're probably much more than I am, but I'm sure someone in the audience would definitely have some some inquiries there. could would love a very brief kind of primer before we jump down full force in the rabbit hole. >> All right. So, Touring Complete goes back to a guy called Alan Turing that wrote or created built the hardware that was used to crack the German codes that the Germans were using to protect their armies in World War II and Turing and the guys at Bletchley Park and invented a lot of modern computing stuff in the process. Uh, and that was instrumental in winning the war. So touring completeness is like it's in the

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=750s) same category as like the team at Los Alamos that made nuclear weapons. It's the same kind of highlevel military innovation with which one can win wars. So a touring programming language is a language which can do anything right if you could think of it you can make it do that off you go. Non-ouring systems are limited usually because they don't have any loops in them. So a touring complete thing could go around and around forever processing data and making changes and decisions and so on. A non- touring system is kind of like a pachinko ball where it falls from the top and it kind of rattles down the system and it can go down a variety of paths but it always stops at the bottom and it will take a predictable amount of time to stop. >> This is a huge oversimplification but generally speaking that's kind of how it works. So the problem with nonuring complete systems is they are nearly impossible to debug. they're really really hard to debug and Ethereum smart contracts are in this weird domain where they are turing complete apart from the fact that there's a gas limit. So the the limit is that you have a programming language which is touring complete but then you have it running on a virtual machine that eventually imposes a stop because of gas and at that point it should have been possible to build formal verification tools for solidity or more properly for the EVM bite code but in practice those efforts were never put front and central because we were kind of pitching to an audience that didn't really understand touring completeness was important that didn't understand or formal verification was important. And formal verification in this context is basically you just keep unrolling the loops, right? You unroll the loops, you unroll the recursion, you just build an enormous graph of the possible execution pathways in the program and the perimeter of that g graph is the gas limit. So you just keep unrolling all the potential execution pathways until you hit the gas limit. Every time there's an if statement, you take both branches of the if. you build an enormous graph and then just crop the graph at the limit of gas and then you can do you know you can run basically graph algorithm analysis on that to figure out whether you have bucks right it's it's not rocket surgery uh and I mean how much has been hacked out of Ethereum smart contracts over the years >> tens of billions I mean just recently the buy bit hack was 1.5 billion >> yeah right so at that point the fact that we weren't able to organize

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=900s) ourselves to build a formal verification workbench for the EVM so that you could absolutely guarantee guaranteeably never ship buggy buggy code again. You know, these are the kinds of things where I kind of point the finger at the Ethereum Foundation being like, well, if that wasn't your job, whose job was it? >> That kind of stuff, right? So, you know, those questions about what was the foundation for and was the foundation meant to market, the question about public goods on Ethereum, all of that stuff. I think 10 years in is a great time to take stock on those questions. >> No, absolutely. And that's it's a super interesting proposition because as someone who's non-technical, I've never really kind of thought about it from that that angle. Naturally, we there there is the um you know star on the lapel of an audited smart contract, but I'm assuming that this would be kind of the approach that some of these auditing firms would be taking, right? Or is it mostly just kind of penetration testing and seeing like, well, where could some failures be? We couldn't really find any. Okay, you're good. Rather than actually unrolling the entire thing as you're you're outlining here. >> Um I am not sure that anybody is doing uh formal verification of Ethereum contracts. Not I I've not seen anybody offering that as a service. I'm sure Google right now right now. >> Anyone listening is out there. That's the uh the next the next era for the next 10 years. The formal the formal verification. That's a >> um powerful. >> So there's something on the Ethereum blog written March 21st. Just a quick rundown discussing how it would work. core logic technique symbolic execution see lots of discussion of it. I don't know whether there's tooling is there tooling program verifiers. Yeah. So I mean uh just I'm just going to drop this into the chat here. So if you guys want to tweet that out if anybody's interested in formal verification there's the current state of the art. >> Nice. >> Um so that I mean that looks like it's a little further along than I thought it was which is nice to see. >> Most definitely. Maybe auditing maybe third party auditing will be a thing in the past. we'll have this workbench that uh we're discussing here and I I mean that that kind of folds us nicely into um the the current paradigm we're in now right so the last 10 years have been um kind of fits and starts we had some great kind of social exposure of Ethereum um you know via ICOs defi NFT for better or worse to kind of a larger retail population and institutions have for better or worse largely seen these

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=1050s) sorts of innovations as interesting uh on one hand or potentially encouraging all the on the other side of the spectrum to you know downright useless and potentially dangerous which I think there's kind of some truth is somewhere in the middle right kind of a twofold question here for you Venet I'm curious do you think that the DeFi summer NFT mania all of that do you think those are primarily distractions from the core vision or do you think they were maybe necessary to get kind of that social percolation of of what was possible with the technology into like a wider context to then maybe set the stage for where we're at today. >> Yeah. So late 2014 I did a talk for the Ethereum Foundation at DevCon Zero called how to sell ideas >> and um what you know what that basically said is like right now there are about 5,000 people in the world that really understand that Ethereum exists and there are about 50 people in the world that understand what Ethereum is. Right? So between now and mass adoption, you're going to have basically six orders of magnitude of growth in the number of people that understand it. If you've got 50 people in the world that understand it now, by the time you've got five million people that understand it, you know, that is a sort of 10,000 to one growth, 100,000 to one growth, right? So that 100,000 to one growth, three 100x jumps, right? And what happens when you get 100x a jump is you get, you know, like you can imagine you're standing in a field with 12 people and then 1,200 people arrive and everybody then discusses what they're doing in the field. Are you one of the original 12? Do you understand how this works? Yeah. No, but I once met one of the original 12. What did they say? Well, they said it's kind of like a world computer. Oh, I thought it was like Bitcoin with some kind of conditional execution clause. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like that, too. And so what you get is this enormous game of Chinese whispers. And then in that enormous game of Chinese whispers, all of the people like the bastards from the multi-level marketing world arrive and what we get is professional scam explainers who arrive and start explaining how Dentcoin is going to make a trillion dollars for everybody that buys it. And you've got, you know, like the Ethereum team sitting in the corner like, do we have an opinion on that? I mean, all all users good users, right? Is that our business? No, probably not actually. I mean, we just provide public infrastructure. We're not here to police who does what with it. Wow, his sho suit is really, really shiny and kind of well tailored. He sounds really

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=1200s) authoritative. And so, pretty soon what happened was that the values of the original team were completely diluted out, right? If you think of like the NFT world, inside of the NFT world, had anybody heard of Vitalik? >> That's a really good point. No, I mean that they're here for the art and uh you know people think the founder of McDonald's is John McDonald, not Ray Croc, right? >> Yeah. You see what I'm saying? Right. So this problem of nobody understood what the tools they were using were. They were just building applications with them. >> Is that a problem? Right? How does the internet work? I don't know. Some guys invented it. What are you doing with it? Oh, we have an app and you can use it to buy and sell airline tickets. Okay. Wow. Right. And so in a sense, victory was becoming invisible. Nobody cares how the platform works. They only care about the applications they're running on. And the application communities were completely separate from the platform engineering activity. Right? If you were a com guy in San Francisco in 200 say five, right? Eight, you know, there you are with your app. You're doing great. Everything's fantastic. You're not paying any attention to the internet engineering task force and you got no idea who Vince Hurf was. So it's it's not that the original team's values kind of being washed out by their users was a bad thing. But then when we kind of get to the philosophical question of what is Ethereum and what is it for the absence of answers kind of is well the application pure people don't have any of the underlying story and then on the underlying story the political vision was probably only held by five or 10 people >> right the Ethereum political view most of the programmers working on it didn't give a monkeys so you know the dilution is a very very powerful thing it's a symptom of success but nonetheless is a symptom No, absolutely. And that's it's that's so interesting because it does remind me a bit of kind of the evolution of language, right? Where where the words will rhyme and have similar kind of syntax and context, but they obviously will not be the same word at all. And so that does kind of for me today beg the question of the fact that you know throughout DeFi summer you FT mania um the ideas of decentralization and ownership those were still kind of core components of the conversation albeit perhaps not to the degree that you know the the original architects of of the Ethereum network originally intended. So it does kind of beg the question for me, right? The the values while diluted or augmented in some way still seem to have at least their core shape or their core syntax if we can run with the language

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=1350s) analogy. Where does that land us here at present day? Because we we've talked a great bit about kind of the the past 10 years for Ethereum, the values and the the configurations. Now we're really finding ourselves at a really unique place, right? Like as the head of research at RWA World, I'm I'm enamored with asset tokenization. um and we're seeing more and more of these assets come on chains. But what does that mean for today when we have this kind of potential augmentation of the values now that we're seeing big incumbents finally come in and kind of fulfill that original vision of businesses using the blockchain? >> Yeah. Yeah. Um wow. It's hard. I mean, you know, I'm thinking here of Trumpcoin like thank god Trumpcoin was issued on Salana. You know, like can you imagine if Trumpcoin had been issu issued on Ethereum, how would I feel about my role in having helped to create Trumpcoin? >> And again, let's separate out Trumpcoin from Trump, right? You know, there is Trump. He's a politician. He's doing the politician thing. I could give you reasons why Trump is better or worse than any politician we've seen in the last 30 years. You know, he's worse than X for this reason. he's better than X for that reason. You know, they're all kind of a mixed bag, right? The American presidency is basically a job for some kind of Sith Lord, and we have the success of different Sith Lords in that job, right? Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump. Oh, I don't know, Obama or Donald Trump. Well, it depends which way you're leaning, right? I'm not arguing that Donald Trump is better or worse than any other American president, but Trumpcoin is by the historical standards of the American presidency one of the most batshit insane things that an American president has ever stood beside, right? It's the official presidential Ponzi scheme. Wow, that's amazing. Is that going to become a new thing like Fourth of July? Well, I don't know. Let's see what happens with the next president, you know. Oh, oh, you know, Vance has become elected. Oh, that's very impressive, isn't it? Is there going to be a Vance coin? Well, I don't know. Maybe it becomes traditional that you have a Ponzi scheme right before you become president. So, you know, I'm very glad that all that stuff is on Salana. I don't have to think about it, right? Not my circus, not my monkeys. Have a nice day. I don't feel morally tied to that. Um, but then you look at like Black Rockck and it's like, oh, Black Rockck's doing stuff on Ethereum, is it now? Yeah, absolutely. And nothing says decentralized crypto assets like $10

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=1500s) trillion of hedge fund run by a collective of the shadyiest people that ever touched finance decentralized did you say? And you know at that point you you kind of have to check your credential and think like am I still a cyber bank? Am I on the right side of the the justice here or did I just slip over and become, you know, just another middle-aged sellout? And you know, that is a really hard question, right? Is is the price of success that you automatically find yourself, you know, on the side of the incumbency or is it possible to be a better generation of, you know, incumbents than the previous generation? But you know, I I sort of feel like we're in a position where it's very hard to imagine success in doesn't involving some degree of selling out. But then how far is too far? And you know what do we do with the crypto anarchist fringe like um you know dark air? >> I'm not familiar with >> you haven't come across air. So air is probably the most dangerous man in crypto, right? I mean I I met him a couple of times in London back in the day and he is literally the trade war to take Guavara of crypto right I mean he has like been in armed rebellions that involved like actual war stuff going on and you know like he's a really serious dude right um and Amir is you know out there attempting to rebuild all the D5 primitives on you know a fully kind of ZKVM type basis so that the entire thing is hardened on from the very bones up. And you know that just screams to me you're going to get hit with the national security banhammer on that. But you know this is our kind of thing of like you got Trumpcoin on Salana at one end, Black Rockck on Ethereum in the middle and then all the crypto anarchy stuff has kind of gone out to this dark thing. And so you find yourself looking at that wondering whether what we're seeing is the same technology comes in a variety of different political and ideological flavors. same code, multiple different rule sets. Um, you know, if if only I had a spare professor of political science to come and have a think about that with me, you know, because I think it's super important, but I just don't have the conceptual toolkit to really represent including. >> That's definitely something we'll have to uh we'll have to double click on, I think, after the uh the the recording V because that's that's actually my background academically is political uh

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=1650s) philosophy um and history. So, this is something that's super interesting to me. the uh wow the differentiation between how you can use the same toolkits like the you know power apparatus of the state um to have radically different outcomes relative to this power concentration stakeholders etc. Um yeah that is very interesting. So definitely want to double click on this um to varying degrees especially as we find ourselves kind of you know at this at this inflection point because I I think you hit on something really important here that you know you can't kind of throw the baby out with the bath water right in terms of incumbents and ultimately if we give the incumbents a a type of new rule set then that can potentially augment their behaviors. But it does beg the question of you know how do we then solve the chicken and the egg problem of incumbents will never ultimately you know come to tokenized things without some level of regulatory clarity because that's the system in which they find themselves. So I'm really I'm really curious as to your thoughts in terms of these next like 10 years of Ethereum for example with the Genius Act and Clarity Acts recently passing in the United States um you know the the cat is out of the bag. We got the uh thumbs up from Trump um in terms of the regulation. Um not sure how it's going to affect his meme token that has no backing and is just hot air. >> I don't think it's actually directly connected to him anymore. Maybe maybe it was launched by a family member with a license for the Trump name. I don't know. >> So someone someone who knew a guy who knew a guy. I would just have loved to be the fly in the room and he received the brief had surpassed Trump. Could you imagine the dialogue? It's a bird. It's a flightless bird. We're looking into it. We're gonna find out what happened. >> Would have loved to see that. Um just >> I'm telling you, but I am curious, you know, do you think this level of um you know, state perceived legitimacy, right, from these clarity and genius acts? Maybe we can throw Micah in there as well from the European side of the equation. Do you think these kind of compliance regimes ultimately help or hinder kind of that vision of of decentralization for the Ethereum network? I'm really curious because it doesn't seem we can get the incumbents without them. >> Okay. So, if we if we assume that decentralization is Iranians and Russians exchanging tokens for let's say uh drone parts. It's hard for me to imagine that the global regulatory structure at the national security end of the apparatus is not going to be rather keen on either understanding that or stopping it. Right? And while we were dealing with a

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=1800s) situation where everybody involved in Ethereum was basically either an academic or a digital monk, you know, we kind of had a class of like scholar programmers that were very material, lightweight. They might own some Bitcoin. They might be rich on paper, but they were still living in Airbnbs in, you know, Saigon and spending 16 hours a day in front of a terminal, right? When everybody involved was like that, what we got was basically a kind of like like I mean there was a point in the early 90s when the dominant life form on the internet were librarians in university libraries. They had internet connections. work was episodic because people would come in once in a while and ask them for something, but most of the time they were sitting at a customer service desk waiting for somebody to show up. And so probably 20 or 30% of the total volume of output on the internet was all from university librarians because they were the people that had free time in front of an internet terminal and they were fascinated by you know tools for accessing knowledge and they were scholarly. So the internet was for a while a very librarianflavored space and those were great years on the internet because librarians are very cool. So 10 15 years ago we had a domain where it was kind of political like sort of political libertarian monastic scholars from the kind of interstate interface between probably Asberers and Anra and those kinds of people when you said decentralization they weren't up to any kind of serious mischief so it didn't really matter if there was no watchdog >> there was just a limited amount of damage they were going to do But now when you've got like, you know, frankly criminal regimes that are exchanging hundreds of millions of dollars for arms shipments using crypto, you know, the North Koreans, did they not steal enough money to build a nuclear weapon recently? >> Yeah, they were behind the Biden hack, the Lazarus group. So they're they're making quite a pretty penny. >> Quite a pretty penny. But but you know, like that is a lot of money in the hands of very bad people. So at that point, how are we supposed to say that, you know, decentralized, end to end, permissionless, private, etc. Is that really the rule set that those people should be playing by as well? >> I kind of feel like that might be like socially negative overall. >> Absolutely. It's a, >> you know, giving the form to the Dentcoin folk again, only on a worse scale,

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=1950s) >> right? you you wind up with, you know, you wind up in a position where decentralization cannot necessarily survive the kinds of people that are now using these systems. >> And again, that's a worry. And where is that discussion being had? Like Washington DC has a round of that. Uh, you know, the European Union has a round of that. Presumably, the Chinese government has a discussion about it. But overall we don't have something like the internet engineering task force which is a global body representing the interests of the industry that is capable of having a sensible discussion with the national security apparatus. >> Um and that that is really delicate. I mean it's a really really dicey area because if we're going to wind up regulated into the ground it's going to be the global security people that do it. Like actually, we've had a look at this and I'm sorry, it's just too freaking dangerous to have this stuff end to end. You're gonna have to go and scan your eyeballs with Sam Alman's technology before you're allowed to have a Bitcoin wallet. >> You see what I'm saying? Right. >> We pop out at the other side. Absolutely. We instead of engineering something that is comparatively decentralized, we've actually just engineered a a digital kind of police state essentially. And if you want to access >> any of the fun things, you ain't got to get your eyeballs scanned. So, >> and I mean, I've had this conversation with people like, look, the only difference between, you know, crypto libertarianism and cryptofascism is whether or not you have to KYC before you're allowed to generate a key. >> That's the only difference. And that was true up until the ZK Snarks arrived. So then you can imagine a situation where everybody has KYCLCTF but all the transactions go through snarks and you can't pull the information back out the snark without a court order. So at that point you could wind up with something that is pretty definitively legalistically fair. Everybody KYCed at the beginning everybody cleared their transactions through snarks. Nobody can see what's going on. But if I come to the snark with a court order, the snark will spit out for me a transaction list for a specific individual, you know, like you could just about do it. Issue keys to the um issue keys to the Supreme Courts of all the jurisdictions that you're interested in working with and they can then figure out how to delegate authorities off those keys. Um again, it'd be a big job. I'd love to take it on. But those are the kinds of things where you might be able to build an interface between legalistic democratic governance and peer-to-peer transactions. >> You know, there are ways it could be

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtWoCdXmEg&t=2100s) designed, but it's a I mean, it's a serious lift. That's a big job. >> Absolutely. And I I do want to get back to the the conversation of what the next 10 years of Ethereum holds in terms of its position, but I think broach a really interesting topic here that I think is very relevant to to your work, Venet. And we have a comment here um on Twitter as well talking about how um certain purchases of RWA or real world assets does not necessarily allow you to own a portion of the underlying asset. And I think that's something that's very salient to what you're building at Mattereum. So before we loop back into um you know Ethereum and its next 10 years and its position, I'd really love to kind of double click on you know what you're working on at Mattereum because what we're having now at this juncture of assets coming on chain is exactly what we've discussed so far, right? businesses are finally doing B2B transactions. We're seeing an inflection point where we have great legit legitimization of of our industry. Um, and finally, it feels like, okay, so something is is happening. We're getting somewhere in terms of the mass adoption of the underlying technology. But personally, I'm wary of actually buying, you know, shares and let's say a dentistry that's based out of Iowa, but when I actually drive it through the building, it turns out it's been abandoned since 1995. and the only thing in there is a shopping cart full of you know various goods that folks who roam the streets like to connect or collect. So my my question for you V is could you walk us a little bit about the work walk us through a little bit of the work you're doing at Mattereum and kind of how you're helping to solve for those underlying legal rights and warrants because I think that's something that's very understated in our industry especially with the hype and excitement around tokenized assets um but something that's so crucial to future proof what we're doing here. >> Yeah. So I mean on this um you know at the end of the day a contract is two people sign a piece of paper and then one person gives the other person money in exchange for the promise of future goods or services. And that structure is really really old. Like that's been a fair description of what a contract is for I don't know I mean I don't even know what the first signed contract is that we have in the records but I'm sure it's well over a thousand years old. um could be two or three thousand Samaran probably. >> I think actually does date back to Samaria. So the delivery of wheat I believe some undescribed date those ancient clay can kaoiform tablets. >> There you go. Right. And and you know that notion that like we've got 3,000 year old contract paperwork. My god this world. Right. So you know you get your 3,000 year old clay tablet. How does that differ from an Ethereum smart contract? You know we have the

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/722-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [722] "10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA Experts Vinay Gupta & Ray Buckton discuss, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.