Elon Musk – Crypto ‘space race’ with BitMEX Has Begun

Elon Musk and BitMEX seem to be in the midst of a 21st-century race to the moon, with each promising to send their own cryptos to the actual moon first. BitMEX, a renowned crypto derivatives exchange, said on June 4 that it will be backing Astrobotic Technology in its ambition to deploy first ever commercial lander to the moon in Q4 2020.

BitMEX hopes to mark the milestone by sending a unique physical Bitcoin to the planet’s surface, emphasizing that the project hopes to be the first time “a private firm leading a consortium of government, academia, business, and key stakeholders entering the lunar plane.”

“We have nothing against Dog Money and we believed it was only appropriate to assist Bitcoin go first,” BitMEX stated, pointing to Musk as a “Dogecoin protagonist.” Elon Musk said in the beginning of May that SpaceX plans to launch a Dogecoin-funded payload on one of its rockets to the moon, claiming that DOGE will be the first cryptocurrency to reach lunar orbit the following year. On Twitter, Elon Musk reacted to BitMEX’s increased astronomical goals, declaring, “A fresh space race has started!”

While many of Elon’s supporters are rooting for DOGE to come out on top the crypto space race, others have pointed out that there are more serious issues on Earth than whether somebody’s crypto token of choice is the first to join another celestial body’s orbit.

While Musk’s Dogecoin mission is one of the few initiatives examining the value of creating crypto network from space that has captivated the public’s curiosity, his intentions to move cryptocurrency out of this planet are not the only one.

Blockstream looks to be the first to employ crypto satellites, deploying satellites in August 2017 to communicate Bitcoin transactions from orbit. Robonomics and Kusama revealed an ambitious proposal in August 2020 to construct “an interplanetary infrastructure” that would use the Kusama network to transfer data between Mars and Earth.

In a November 2017 whitepaper, CryptoSat explained the premise behind its grandiose ambition to deploy a nano-satellite the size of a coffee cup into space, with the satellite expected to function as an independent cryptography unit from orbit.

The company intends to test the idea with a debut this year before launching a whole constellation of CryptoSats sometime in 2021. In 2017, Spacechain launched, with nodes successfully placed in orbit. The project reported on June 3, 2021 that its multisig Ethereum payload headed for the International Space Station has been launched onboard a SpaceX rocket.