This is already the third launch of SpaceChain. The node will operate for about a year, ensuring transactions with multiple signatures.
It was reported that on Thursday, December 5th, at 12:29, a Bitcoin wallet created by SpaceChain developers was launched into the Earth’s stratosphere aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
Upon arriving at the International Space Station (ISS), the node weighing 2 lb, which is only a fraction of the 5,700 lb load of the SpaceX CRS-19 refueling mission, became the first active Bitcoin node of the ISS.
SpaceChain believes that the launch is a step forward in its mission to build a robust and decentralized blockchain infrastructure beyond Earth. The wallet will be beyond the jurisdiction of any country and beyond the reach of any physical hardware.
SpaceChain nodes are a radical new way to make cryptocurrency transactions safer. This is the third launch of the three-year-old company and the first made from the United States, as the other two were made from China.
Zee Zheng, CEO, and co-founder of SpaceChain, believes that the wallet will play a small but important role in meeting that goal. Once the astronauts aboard the ISS install it, the node will operate for approximately one year, securing multiple signature transactions through the ISS data feed.
The company of 23 people focused on this launch for much of 2019 and pursued that goal since they proposed it 18 months ago.
Zheng said that all of the company’s resources were put into the project. SpaceChain refused to disclose cargo space and research and development costs. What they did report is that they were established through Nanoracks, whose CEO, Jeffrey Manber, is also an advisor to SpaceChain.
Creating a space wallet was one thing, but making it compatible for use in the ISS was something completely different. The SpaceChain open source protocol had to be examined by NASA and designed to plug the station’s architecture, according to Zheng.
The executive said that having Jeff Garzik as Technical Director of SpaceChain helped in that regard. Garzik was one of the leading Bitcoin developers and led the construction of the software that will soon be integrated with the ISS. Besides, he had thought about the use of blockchain technology in space even before SpaceChain was founded.
It should be noted that this launch is far from its first space project: a Raspberry Pi equipped with a Qtum node that the company launched from the Gobi desert of China in February 2018.
Its second release, also from China, was a little more developed. That hardware could run blockchain dApps on the SpaceChain operating system and communicate directly with Earth.
This new wallet will operate independently from the previous launches of SpaceChain. It will not communicate with the previous nodes and all communications will be sent through the transmission of the ISS to ground. This means that the device will have a slower connection and will take hours, not minutes, to complete a single transaction.
Zheng said that they wanted to make the device slower and he described the speed as a feature rather than an error.
This attribute could attract important customers: custody services, exchange houses and business customers, according to Zheng, who are more willing to make transactions for a few extra hours, for their peace of mind.
The node will live with other experiments sent to the ISS, including Anheuser Busch’s study on malt sugar in space and an experiment to test the effects of microgravity on genetically modified mice.
In recent months SpaceChain received a grant of EUR 60,000 from the European Space Agency. Zheng explained that the exposure that comes with NASA and SpaceX will help make the mission bigger.
However, he insists that SpaceChain is rocket agnostic, so he is willing to commit to any agency, anywhere and at the right time. He also believes that NASA and SpaceX were the ideal partners for the December 5th launch, as were the Chinese partners for the first two.
Zheng notes that next March they will use an Indian rocket, referring to one of the two launches that SpaceChain has planned for the next 18 months.
Within 10 years, SpaceChain could deploy a network of satellites that “talk to each other” and manage much more blockchain infrastructure than any ISS wallet, Zheng reported. Until then, Zheng and SpaceChain would continue the race towards their orbital goal.
By Willmen Blanco
