In this interview, Vinay Gupta—former Ethereum launch project manager and CEO of Materium—explains his company’s mission to create legal digital identities (digital asset passports) for physical goods using Ethereum smart contracts. He illustrates the concept with a high‑profile collaboration with William Shatner to authenticate Star Trek memorabilia, describing how a physical tag, video, and smart contract together certify authenticity. Gupta then broadens the discussion, arguing that cryptocurrency’s value lies far beyond payments; it can embed provenance, moral, environmental, and health preferences into software, allowing users to automatically avoid products they disagree with. He envisions a future where many physical goods become commoditized (post‑scarcity), shifting true scarcity to taste, aesthetic judgment, and knowledge. Gupta also explains why Materium builds on Ethereum, noting its ubiquity while acknowledging that future generations may adopt new protocols, and he reflects on the longevity of physical artifacts versus digital records. The conversation blends layperson‑friendly explanations, cultural references, and forward‑looking philosophical insights.
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TranscriptAuto-generated · 12 min
So here we are again, Crypto Granny chasing everyone who's passing by. But I'm, I'm so happy and so honored to talk to Vinay Gupta and his doll. You will need to tell me all about that, but maybe first you would like to tell my Finnish followers and ConsenSys people, who are you and what do you do?
Sure. So, I'm Vinay Gupta. I've been involved in the crypto world for more than 20 years. And I was associated with the Ethereum project when I project managed the launch. I'm now CEO of a company called Materium, which builds on top of Ethereum to build what amount to digital asset passports for physical goods. So, it provides you like a legal digital identity for a thing. And that allows you to do things like the project that we're doing here with William Shatner to do authentication for Star Trek memorabilia.
Okay, that is very interesting. So here I would kind of like to ask a Cryptocratic question. So what does that mean, what you are doing, for people like myself that has no technical understanding whatsoever? How will I benefit from whatever you're doing?
Okay, so it's very simple, right? Suppose that you were a collector of something, right? In the future, and by the future I mean this year, you'll be able to take your phone out, you'll be able to scan the tag on the object, it will come back, read the blockchain information on the tag, and it will come back and verify that the object is genuine.
Okay, well, that is very understandable even to me. And, you know, my friends for sure, they would understand as well. I've seen you going around with this Star Trek captain here. So would you like to tell a bit more about that? Because I'm very curious understanding.
So William Shatner is the actor that first portrayed Captain Kirk, and he's a legend in the sci-fi world. You know, almost anybody of my generation that's involved in technology grew up on Star Trek, and that was what the future was going to be like, right? And we're all kind of unconsciously or consciously building towards that Star Trek future. So William Shatner took an interest in the blockchain and we have a project with Mr. Shatner to just provide authentication services for, you know, his world and all the people associated in it. And he signed this and put an Ethereum logo on it. And what we'll do is we'll take the video of that event and we'll take the tag and all the rest of these pieces, put them together into a package that you access as a smart contract on the Ethereum chain. And that will be the first asset that we've done in this digital way. And we're very happy about this because for us, you know, it's like, it's kind of a chance to work with somebody that had this enormous influence on the culture and in the way that technologists conceive of their profession, right? So this is very iconic for us. It was a very emotional moment when we realized it was actually happening.
Okay, and it's so great. And actually, I can so relate to that because Obviously, I met you yesterday already very briefly in the press conference, and I've been, you know, seeing you a couple of times today, and you very closely keep this box with you. So obviously, it's a lot, you know, related to these emotions. But basically, very, very quickly, how do you see the future for us, people like myself, not necessarily have joined the movement as yet, not necessarily in the cryptos as yet. How long will it take time? What maybe will be the thing that will start changing this, like, actively, the people getting on board more and more? What is your prediction?
So I think that cryptocurrency is a pretty limited way of looking at what crypto can do, right? At the end of the day, payments are payments, and payments are a tiny part of life, right? I don't care how your credit card works. As long as there's money in your bank account, you don't care how your bank software operates. So, if we think of crypto as being a tool for just doing payments, a better version of a bank is still pretty much like a bank, right? It's not a revolution. Maybe in future, maybe if you're interested in central banking, the political side, sure. But for day-to-day users, eh, right? On the other hand, I think everybody wants more control of their life, right? You want to know what's in your food. You want to know that your pharmaceuticals are correctly delivered. You don't want there to be errors in your medical care. You don't want to be making the world a worse place just by existing in it. So you want to be able to do things like offset all your carbon emissions. You want to be able to not consume goods that come from countries whose human rights regimes you don't agree with. So what I see us working towards here is a world in which goods are clearly identified across all of these levels, material, moral, environmental, and where software will help us avoid buying things that we are either allergic to or disagree with. And that, I think, is a world that we all really appreciate because once the software has fully interpenetrated matter, you can then set your preferences for how your life will work. You know, don't let me buy anything from this country. It's got terrible human rights. I'm really upset about what I saw on the news. Automatically stop buying from that place. And then you just no longer see the listings. You don't accidentally buy something on eBay. You get warned if you're buying coffee from that Ignatian Expo. Those kind of abilities to amplify our moral choices with technology, I think that's what you will see, right?
Okay, yeah, and actually it's very easy, or myself at least, I find it very easy to agree with you because mainly and firstly it was the technology that attracted me, that got me kind of interested in, and then the experiment phase, if you wish, was kind of easy to do at this stage of the, you know, of time via downloading a crypto wallet and just kind of understanding how does this work. Again, as someone who has no technical background, so that was already very, very exciting and kind of a new, new different experience. But I really, really want to thank you so much for your time. I know you're so busy. Everyone wants to interview you. So I hope you enjoy your stay in Malta and looking forward to talking to you and Captain Kirk soon enough again. Thank you so much, Vinny.
Oh, it's been really fun meeting you. Very good talking. Thank you.
Okay.
Thank you. Yeah, my name is Niko. I caught you briefly in Oxygen in Helsinki last year, I think so. I didn't get all of your presentation, but it was very interesting. And I wanted to ask you a couple more questions about Materium. Is that how you pronounce it? So it's a token platform, correct?
No. No? They
won't
be able to hear unless you point the mic at them. Yeah. No, no, it's not a token platform. It's a set of legal and smart contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem. So, it's a bunch of commercial infrastructure that sits on top of Ethereum. And we could do some projects on other platforms, but mainly it's legal and commercial infrastructure.
Okay. So, it's like a layer 2 solution for Ethereum?
No, it's more like— remember HTTPS certificates? You used to buy them from certificate authorities. So, it's closer to being a certificate authority than a crypto network. Right. It's like a certification agency that figures out what's true about things and then provides evidence and proof of that that other people can then integrate into their smart contracts.
So, it's similar to a lot of these like supply chain projects that basically make the status quo better and less, how to say, more trustless.
Well, I mean, it's just being able to provide essentially a digital identity for a physical thing. Right, so once you've got digital identities for physical things, you can then present that digital identity through Ethereum or through some other network that you're working with as something that has legal consequences if there's an error in it. So it gives you the ability to really get solid proof of what things are.
All right, so why Ethereum?
Well, I was the project manager for the Ethereum launch. It's the world's most widely deployed smart contract platform. There are lots of fast variations of Ethereum, like there's Hyperledger Burrow and these kind of things. So if we needed to work in a permissioned way, we could, although our stuff will be on mainchain initially. And it works.
Okay, do you think that you will change protocol possibly in the future?
Well, I mean, 20 years from now, there is a small chance that Ethereum will be what the entire planet runs on, but it's much more likely to be some 4th generation system based on totally different principles. I'd like to think that Ethereum will take over the world. Fingers crossed, we might get lucky. But realistically, the goods will last far longer than the data about the goods on a given protocol. I mean, one of the objects we're working with is a Stradivarius violin collection. And those instruments are, what, 325 years old? They are almost certainly going to outlast any information technology that's used to describe them.
That's interesting. I wanted to— one last question I'll ask you about scarcity. So, do you think we'll be reaching at some point the age of post-scarcity world, so to say, so we can replicate things? And if so, what are the scarce things then? Knowledge? Bitcoin? Ethereum? What are your thoughts?
So, we're already in a post-scarcity world, right?
How so?
Well, I mean, consider paper. Paper used to be incredibly scarce and very valuable. It used to be literally goat hide vellum. We're now post-scarcity for paper. We're post-scarcity for calories. We're post-scarcity for spectacles and toothbrushes, clothes. Scarcity is a thing that happens like a category at a time. Layer by layer by layer by layer, we eliminate scarcity, usually by industrial mass production. And in those areas, Goods don't become valueless. It's just the value drops to the price of production plus a couple of percent of profit, and then the goods just are commodities. So I think that most of the post-scarcity push will just be turning all of the world's luxuries into commodities, and everything will cost 2% more than the price of manufacture. You'll stop seeing an enormous premium on scarce objects. But I don't think life will feel very different. I think it'd be a remarkably I think it'll be remarkably like the present. And then what has scarcity is taste. Being able to identify the good stuff and share it with people will turn out to be the main profession.
That's interesting. Thank you for your time so much, and I'm not going to hold you back longer.
No problem. Let me say a little more about the post-scarcity thing, right? So, do you have some kind of music streaming platform you use, like Spotify or Tidal or one of these things? Not anymore. But you did, right? So, during that period, you were post-scarcity for music. All the music was there. The question is, what do I want to listen to now? Where's the good stuff? What will I choose? Specifically taste, aesthetic judgment. Finding things that suit your aesthetics becomes the difficult choice. So, I think in the future, excellent aesthetic judgment will be the most valuable thing and the world will be largely dominated by the people that that are currently artists. But in the future, I think that artistic judgment will become massively more important because there'll be so much to choose from that making the right choices, making the beautiful choices, will become enormously empowered.
Oh, that's really interesting. That's a topic that I'm really into. We actually made a video on the ConsenSys Network channel about post-scarcity world where we talked about this stuff. And yeah, I think my perspective is that Time and Bitcoin are close to being something like the only things that are going to be scarce. And knowledge, of course, like you mentioned also, the knowledge of what is good, what is beautiful, what is— that is very valuable. Very good insight. Thank you so much.
