Thread by @leashless

So we've built it. @Mattereum I mean. Stage one is basically done: we've got customers selling NFTs on @OpenSea, backed by physical items, and new people are coming on board slowly but steadily. It is a business.

Constant pressure to issue the token and to THE BIG ICO like 2018.

A lot of the other companies in the NFT space have raised *extremely* large amounts of money on very, very thin product plans. We recognise bubble thinking. I'm not 100% sure the "just take the money" approach produces much working product in the long run, but people do their way

What we're planning on doing is this: we're going to keep putting great physical assets on chain until the NFT space wakes up and says "oh my god this is *exactly* how the blockchain takes over the world: ACTUAL GOODS AND SERVICES!"

And at that point, fundraising will be easy.

You ask me when that awakening moment will happen, I'd say "two more weeks."

Oh, and we're CO2 offsetting physical gold mining too *right now* - buy gold with the CO2 offsets for the gold mining, and the Ethereum gas.

opensea.io/assets/0xd3fda… offsets here passport.mattereum.com/lohko.100g.gol…

I sort of feel this is the last calm I get before a five year storm of constant, continual, explosive growth as the world's valuable physical assets pour into the platform which gives them the best possible trading environment: secure, trusted, reliable, safe.

Ethereum grows up.

This technology has always been about *the real world* but we lacked the *bridges* to get at it: exchanges pulled dollars into the blockchain, but there was very little equivalent machinery to get from the blockchain back out into the real world to start repairing the real world.

And we are not kidding around: we've got the *team* to actually start taking on real world problems like modern slavery *and winning*

linkedin.com/in/antonshelup… (our MD)

northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlor… (my old job)

mattereum.com/2021/05/04/mod…

We intend to fight for the real world, and win.

I was in the "save the world" business long, long before the blockchain existed. I used whatever tooling I had to hand: myths, stories, legends, plywood, saws, screw guns.

I built and open-sourced ultra-cheap housing. Homeless people live in them in LA.

shareable.net/the-unplugged/

LALAUNCHPAD.ORG is *actual homeless people* in a Free Hardware refugee house. I've been neglecting this project a little bit of late, Mattereum has been all-consuming, but we're going to come back around with Asset Passports to prove charitable giving really made homes.

the hexayurt was my primary focus for many years, now they're everywhere

Now I want to talk about consciousness a little bit.

I am *grounded*. I come from a culture and a background which does not shrink away from the darkness of the world, but which takes a solid grip of the situation and tries to steer it to correctness, and wellness.

Engagement.

So to me, the blockchain is a tool to make sure that people keep their promises *in the real world*.

Right now, we don't have that. We have rug pulls.

That's not The Way. One does not create a better future for humanity by using this sublime and sophisticated tech for rug pulls

We get a better world with a culture of truth.

What do I mean by a "culture of truth?"

I mean a culture where we disbelieve ridiculous promises and massively over-inflated claims about new products, just because we own the tokens.

Where we question maximalism: tech *changes*.

The blockchain field is choking in bullshit right now, you know it and so do I.

Changing the world takes grit. We can't just all pretend to believe each-other's bullshit because it makes the token prices go up and convinces the normies to buy in: there's no future in this at all

So my vision of the blockchain future is that we use the blockchain to straighten out physical reality.

You want to know how long these laptops last, on average? It's on the blockchain, statistical data from 18000 units bought-sold-and-scrapped.

You want to buy a house? An NFT!

You can only do that trade, buy a house as an NFT, if there's no rug pull on the NFT: there has to actually be a house.

But @Mattereum's got that gap closed: you buy the NFT, you get the physical goods. Soon enough, not just gold and art, but homes and skyscrapers.

We did it.

And we did that by creating enforceable justice on the blockchain.

Smart contracts deliver enforceable justice - self-enforcing justice - on the blockchain.

With an adapter, the Mattereum system, that self-enforcing justice can be extended into the physical world *by degrees*.

Extending self-enforcing justice to well-documented items stored in vaults with big steel doors is *a first step* towards something much, much bigger.

Actually read that carbon claim passport.mattereum.com/lohko.100g.gol… CO2 offsets for gold bar production.

That's an *enforceable contract*.

So what we're doing here is *extending the domain of economically enforceable contracts using smart contract technology*.

Cheaper contract creation, more effective enforcement, create a recipe for *making sellers promise more about what they are selling*.

More truth in trade.

You can buy things in a web environment: you buy an Apple phone charger on Amazon, it's probably going to be a fake.

One of my favourite brands got *nuked* for lying on Amazon lifehacker.com/what-the-hell-…

But what-if we @Mattereum-ized this whole process, end to end onchain trust?

Now you buy the NFT directly from the manufacturer, for an item with a unique serial number. There's enough brains in that charger that it could store a crypto key.

Turn the NFT into a delivery order, verify the charger's ID agains the NFT ID.

Only NFT owners can post reviews.

Now, maybe we need to do *way* more than that to really clean this mess up: we need to get into the CO2 emitted by manufacturing and using this item, and we need to make sure the people who made it weren't slave labor in an American prison factory.

Yes, America. Did you know?

Nobody wants to buy or own products that were manufactured by prison labour.

Nobody wants this

The ONLY way these people are able to function is because products conceal their history so effectively that buyers never know (and can never find out) sources
pbs.org/newshour/econo…

So in my book, The Future of Stuff, amazon.com/Future-Stuff-V… I did the deep dive about exactly how we could use the blockchain *and a new human right* to repair our society and world.

The new human right is the right to know everything about what you purchase.

"The right to know everything about what you purchase" applies to food: "is this vegan? any peanuts?"

It applies to clothes: "I'm allergic to wool."

It applies to CO2: "emissions on this?"

It applies to slavery: "who made this? what were they paid?"

You want a better world?

A vast amount of global change can be triggered by implementing and standing behind this new human right: the right to know everything about what you are buying.

Furthermore it should be possible to rally broad public support: millions of people want to know about their products

The reasons are super-diverse: allergy sufferers, people who want to boycott goods made in some countries, vegans, vegetarians, those who believe in the circular economy, all of these different kinds of people want to know what is in their products.

Parents *REALLY* want to know

We take that fundamental consumer demand to KNOW what we are paying for (to have the same information about the goods that the manufacturers have) and we pair that drive to Ethereum blockchain technology.

That's how @Mattereum is going to change the world: transparency in trade.

And this is a new direction for the Blockchain Revolution: "transparency for all the things!"

Building a transparent world makes it impossible to hide the environmental and social crimes that pollute our planet and our conscience. Nobody wants to be buying this poison by retail.

This is how we get a better world using the blockchain.

It's not as simple as bitcoin maximalism. It's not as elegant as the digital tokens vision.

It's broad, comprehensive, and messy. It's laden-down with the guilt and shame of centuries of exploitation and ecocide. It's real

But if we are going to dig out way out of this global hole that we are in, we need to stop digging down: we have to actually start to construct a regenerative economy.

And that's not about middle class hippies: it's about stopping slave labour manufacturing crappy wasteful goods

Here's what I was doing a few years before Ethereum got started

That's the beating heart inside of @Mattereum. This is our vision for the future: a world in which capitalism is neither extractive nor polluting.

No force, no fraud: what's in my purchases?

Something must be done scheerpost.com/2021/05/31/chr…