tl;dr: Today, crypto exists in a purely digital world. One day, it will be integrated into the fabric of our lives. Another step in that direction.
I’m pretty worked up right now about the state of the economy and, in particular, the injustice being done to the millions of Americans and billions of people around the world whose assets are limited.
But, I need to take a break from that rage for a bit to point out a a post on the MakerDAO forum because it gives me a bit of hope.
The post is only an initial proposal for supporting real world (physical) assets as collateral in the Maker Protocol.
What that means, at some distant point in the future, is that you could put the deed to your house or a stock certificate or a diamond ring into a Maker vault and then mint DAI, the most widely accepted stablecoin in the world.
From there, you could take your DAI and invest in, lend it, do whatever you want–gamble with it. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that your physical assets will-one day- be much, much more liquid than they are now and more fungible. Piles of paperwork and signature will be like watching someone operate a telegraph.
What makes me sad is that I may not live to see this day. It’s going to take a bit of time. It certainly won’t happen overnight and it’s extremely unlikely by the end of the year.
As you can imagine, the legal and regulatory challenges alone could take years.
One of the leaders in this space is Vinay Gupta. He and his team at Mattereum (including a partnership with William Shatner) have been working on this for a while now (see here and here for past posts on Mattereum).
Bringing real world assets onto a blockchain is not a trivial exercise, but that’s not really the point.
The point is to look through the post on the MakerDAO forum and appreciate the open innovation process that is happening…in front of our eyes and in real-time.
It starts off really messy…with a bunch of posts on an Internet forum. One day, millions of people will put real world assets into MKR vaults. None of them will even know or care that the forum post ever existed.
But that’s where it will have started.
