Copernic Space launches world’s first sale of space assets

finextra.com:

A subsequent public sale, live in the coming months, will bring a much-needed level of democratisation to the cosmic arena by allowing the retail market to purchase fractionalised, virtual ownership of the space assets via non-fungible token (NFT) technology. Launching aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9, Lunar Outpost's MAPP rover is headed for the moon’s south pole, in December 2022. After gathering samples for NASA, the rover will remain on the moon forever.

In an exclusive interview with Finextra, Grant Blaisdell, creator and co-founder of Copernic Space, revealed that building the project took “years of discovery - even just to understand how to create a business model out of this new frontier. The launch of the sale is the proving ground for Copernic Space. But today is not just a significant moment for the company, it’s a historical moment for the wider space economy, and the public's access to it.” One example use case for the space payload, suggested Blaisdell, could be the delivery of a physical, artistic statue to the moon.

There it would stay while the public bought and sold portions (10,000 pieces, to be exact) of the installation via the secondary marketplace, hosted on Copernic’s Web 3.0 platform. In terms of the sidechain, Copernic is launching on Polygon - the energy consumption of which is 100,000 times less than that of the Ethereum blockchain. On the sustainability point, Blaisdell noted: “I really think it's less of an issue than people make it out to be.

The key for us is that Polygon provides high scalability and low transaction costs. We don’t want to be treated as stupid novelty, or another NFT pulling money out of the retail market. We are delivering a legitimate solution to the space economy, which