# Vinay Gupta - Hexayurt Capital - World Blockchain Forum

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [744]. 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, 2017-10-17 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TayyvOxWs. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Finance mechanism for large infrastructure, akin to GVDB.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (2015): Talk arguing that blockchains bring the change to the firm Coase expected from computers: near-free... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
  - Hexayurt Capital Partners (2016): Talk on a new venture model: startups as factories for financial instruments, entrepreneurs as the scarce... (suggested by machine)
  - 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:
  - 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)
  - 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)
  - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Equity crowdfunding & venture capital (40%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (20%); Smart contracts, law & arbitration (20%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: accredited investors (3 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); ICO (4 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); IPO (2 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); venture capital (2 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Scotland (2 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Mars (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); geoengineering (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 2 undated); New York Convention (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); legal status (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); science fiction (1 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): New York Convention
- Importance: core-text score 0.33 (1.00 is the top), number 213 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [565] [Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
  - [569] [How Crypto Interacts With Real World Assets (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/569.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [265] [European Parliament blockchain presentation May 2017 (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/265.md); [263] [Ethereal Summit (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/263.md); [834] [A Blockchain Solution for Identity? – Internet of Agreements (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/834.md)
- On the same works, just after: [699] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md); [40] [First Internet of Agreements Conference Recap – Internet... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/40.md); [660] How to make smart contracts legally binding? I Mihai... (2017)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Vinay Gupta - Hexayurt Capital - World Blockchain Forum, video, 2017-10-17, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TayyvOxWs; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [744], https://guptaoption.com/texts/744.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TayyvOxWs&t=0s) right now we're in position where we've got a set of mechanisms for financing innovation which are pretty well understood the VC model is something like 50 years old Investment Banking maybe a couple hundred years old everybody is a basic mobile how all this stuff goes the question is how does the ICO world with its enormous ability to generate capital on target very very quickly integrate into the much wider global innovation need so the basic question is why can't we build more amazing stuff right you know the world is filled with mega projects like Hyperloop like the Mars mission like the hard end of a I like all the geoengineering stuff you might want to do to try and combat climate change and general-purpose robotics it's filled with these kind of you know multi-billion dollar spend projects which it's more or less impossible to finance inside of the existing systems without massive government intervention Tesla for example it's something like five billion dollars of US government loans that this is not gonna scale for all projects the core issue here is that the innovation economy that we're used to was almost entirely government-funded up until the 1970s there was basically a century of massive government spending on these kind of mega projects and it lays down a framework of innovation that then continues to pay dividends for the next 30 40 50 years as the incremental innovation is mined out so if you think about the Manhattan Project on the American moonshot all of that kind of stuff that comes out of the Manhattan Project than your poll program then goes into become the foundation of Silicon Valley right you start with these kind of private enterprise projects and you think oh yeah this is all of our wonderful entrepreneurial activity but it's built on 30 40 50 years of spending that lays the foundations on which that stuff grows and because the innovation boom is going so nicely in the 70s and 80s the government stopped doing this kind of heavy investment in so it's obvious the free enterprise doesn't need any help and then the mega projects stopped getting built one thing on though is that free software kind of makes an exception to this because it finds a new economic model for spreading the entrepreneur risk of building these kind of mega projects so the free software ecosystem is estimated have been worth something like 150 billion dollars it could be more by now and that enormous throw at creation of wealth is possible because of sharing right it's the IP license in

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TayyvOxWs&t=150s) the permits explosion but for things that you can't do that kind of innovative licensing for it's very hard to capitalize mega projects so my suggestion is that with a little bit of work we could reorganize the way that we think about the ico in a way that would give us the potential to fund these kind of mainstream mainline heavy engineering mega projects I'm kind of get planetary civilization back on track towards this kind of high tech future that we could have if we don't wind up simply racing to the bottom on margin shaving as the primary application of technology so the appetite for capital I mean if you just sit down and think about all the science fiction stuff which is just about buildable right now right and space elevators they're right on the edge of material science everything to do with humanoid robotics everything to do with getting AR and VR up to the point where they're indistinguishable from the real world everything to do with direct neural interface like you'll must work on neural lace all of this kind of stuff is in a position where it's just looking for finance the technical capabilities are just about there there's no doubt at all that if you did a 5 10 15 20 year heavy spand burn to get that stuff real it would become real the thing which is missing is the finance and it's very hard for people put money behind stuff that they don't understand you know how are we to tell when somebody comes up to us with a scheme for one of these kind of mega projects whether what they're selling us is a perpetual motion machine how are we supposed to differentiate between the projects that we should be putting this kind of global capital behind and the projects which are basically just shenanigans how are we to tell so my suggestion is that in the face of this kind of uncertainty right when you think about the cold fusion thing 30 years ago 40 years ago we're still not entirely sure whether that was real science or not in the light of this kind of uncertainty we need some kind of intelligent approach to managing the risk right because if we try and tell the regulators in the world that we just want to burn you know the entire risk capital of society on unproven mega engineering projects they're going to give us a really hard time about this and rightly so the reason that Scotland became unified with England is because of thing called the darién scheme where the Scots invested something like 10% of the working capital of Scotland in attempting to set up a colony somewhere outside of Panama that turned out to be a disaster and the following financial

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TayyvOxWs&t=300s) crash was so bad and it hit the working capital of the economy so badly there was nothing left to do but give up sovereignty and unify with England and you know the real-world consequences of these kind of bubbles and crashes are extremely severe politically in this state we'll try and prevent that stuff happening you know this kind of stuff right is as much to protect the government from the volatility that results in society when you get hard crashes as it is to protect individual investors there are social imperatives that they're trying to protect stock market crashes in the 1920s in the 1930s America becomes dramatically politically unstable this is not just an individual investor imperative it's actually about the stability of government so here's my suggestion right now the accredited investor frameworks which are used all over the world that are designed to protect investors basically measure wealth the assumption is that once you've got a few million pounds spare a few million dollars spare you ought to be allowed to burn that money anywhere you like including investing it in questionable things and this is okay up to a point but it's then also coupled with the enormous protective systems that run around things like IPOs they worked very very very hard to make sure that the stuff which is offered to the general public through the IPO mechanisms is frankly practically zero risk it should have commercial risk it shouldn't really have scientific or technical risk and the inability to put big money behind scientific and technical risk is why we can't get the big stuff done we're tying the hands of our innovators because we won't let the finance chase scientific and technological innovation past a certain point of risk and the really big rewards or at least level of risk F no higher so notionally we could accredit investors for their technical knowledge you could go and say okay well look you've got in a master's degree in computer science and you've got 10 years in the field you want to be able to assess whether or not a piece of software technology is feasible and at that point we can accredit that you're a technically sophisticated investor inside of software technology and you should be allowed to put money behind anything you like and that's a relatively small change to the current investor regulation landscapes but it's the kind of change which could open up the legal side of the IPO markets ICO markets rather on an enormous scale because there are probably two three four million people who would mail a pass some kind of certification process as a software technology investor and those people have a combined disposable

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TayyvOxWs&t=450s) income of many billions of dollars a year right now the majority of that income is not investable because most of those people are not accredited investors and they can't become accredited investors under the current regimes so the opportunity here is for government to make a relatively small regulatory change which is opening up a new class of accredited investors and then that stabilizes the legal status of the entire ICO market because only people with the investor certification can participate which basically means that technologists are funding other technologists which is the way the venture capital was when venture capital was effective does this kind of make sense but it's a very straightforward proposal it's not over ambitious the ambitious for us what comes next so the thesis is that all this stuff has to get funded government wants it funded Society wants it funded it may be the civilization needs it funded and the thing that's getting in the way is this accredited investor certification we've taken down all the transactional barriers because the blockchain allows us to do the transactional side of this kind of mass investment strategy really really easily but what we don't have is the legal right to do this stuff and you know if you've seen recently with the Chinese government rewinding all of the icos that happened there's a real stressor here about whether or not we're going to let people do this stuff or not the idea that they rewound all these I SEOs and people have to put them back where it came from that's an entire set of innovation which will simply never exist because the money is gone and that could happen or to almost anything we need to get this stuff on a solid legal foundation before we can go forward to do things like the mega projects and big engineering so that's how we're gonna pay for this right the sensible approach to funding the kind of mega spend so we'll be required to do things like go to Mars is that we need to open up the legal structures necessary by accrediting investors based on their technical sophistication and then once those doors are open we could do large-scale organization of capital using the blockchain to get everything organized to take these kind of risks simple story now Oh run slides guys there's a second copy of that slide deck that was late night update mo asked me to change a couple of things that are like five more slides it's in the same shared folder sorry about that any questions just fall together is there the decks organized we got about a few seconds we'll be switching over what I'm going to talk about next is how we

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TayyvOxWs&t=600s) build courts that have the ability to handle this kind of risk in this kind of technical sophistication because the existing legal structures that we have are very bad at handling litigation in high risk high technology cases so the problem when you get into this kind of hard grind is it becomes very very very hard to get a court to adjudicate on whether something is a responsible legal contract so when you get extremely large scale litigation between tech companies over things like patent portfolios these are hundred million dollar court cases they're incredibly expensive and it has an enormous chilling effect on innovation so the suggestion I have is that it's possible to build private courts using a mechanism called arbitration and international arbitration and these private courts have the ability to create opt in private law so two parties to a contract for example all the people that are interested in funding some kind of large-scale high-tech mega-project sign up to a private court system which is operated by independent neutral third parties with high-level technical expertise and these systems are handling hundreds of major cases a year we're talking about tens of billions being transferred and they're completely reliable they're completely solid they'd other force from a Finkle the 1958 New York Convention and they're binding 160 states so with this architecture you could take your smart contract mechanisms which provide all the sophisticated handling of money and ultra low-cost transactional environments and you compare them with private enforcement that has the ability to make those contracts legally binding and legally enforceable in 160 countries and Vout as an architecture on which you could build a really substantial step function change in our ability to do innovation globally we are building the first core of that kind right now in London in tight cooperation with the city of London and it's called Mattereum and if you're interested in more information there's a white paper on Mattereum comm and we're basically partnering with organizations right now to connect them to those court systems and to verify that they're smart contract technologies are suitable for use in those courts and we're open for business I'll leave you with that for more information thank you very much [Applause]

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End of [744] Vinay Gupta - Hexayurt Capital - World Blockchain Forum. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [699](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md) Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017); the most closely related, [565](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md) Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.