Crypto company wants to send $1.5 million in Bitcoin to the moon

Star Trek envisions a world where humanity has branched out beyond the borders of our home planet in the name of exploration and peace. LunarCrush, a crypto and NFT stock trading platform founded in 2018, has chosen a more prosaic motivation: cold hard cash.

A stash of 62 Bitcoin, currently worth roughly $1.5 million (though who knows how long that will last), will be sent to the surface of the moon, the company recently announced — where it will wait to be claimed by all who happens to make it up there first.

To get their hands on the lunar millions, the would-be crypto hunter must find a specific private key — a code planned to be etched onto a MAPP Rover provided by commercial space startup Lunar Outpost.

After receiving the code, the vessel will be launched into space via a SpaceX rocket in the last quarter of this year. When exact that it will happen has yet to be confirmed – an omission that LunarCrush adds for “security reasons”.

Whatever these reasons, the delay is probably welcome: as it stands, the digital treasure chest is pretty empty. LunarCrush hopes to fund the prize by selling a collection of Bitcoin-backed NFTs, priced at $250. Of that, they say, a quarter will go into the lunar container; the same amount in turn will fund a “Community Marketing Wallet” dedicated to funding Bitcoin core development and STEM education-related causes (the destination of the other half of the total is left to our imaginations).

It is arguably something of a gamble to trust NFTs – a medium that is as famous for its flops and failures as its successes at this point. Worldwide interest in the former Zeitgeisty technology has pretty much never been lower, with the average price dropping by nearly 90 percent last year to well below the $250 price tag asked by LunarCrush.

While $1.5 million may sound like a tempting bounty, it pales in comparison to what a trip to the moon is likely to cost, at least with today’s technology. It was less than a year ago that NASA bragged about how cheap its upcoming CAPSTONE lunar mission would be — a paltry under $10 million. Even at that price tag, NASA isn’t sending up any astronauts or rovers—just a single robotic probe the size of a microwave designed only to go into orbit.

Of course, the teams behind the Bitcoin campaign refuse to let a simple thing like the limits of current human progress cow their ambitions: “When you set a seemingly unattainable goal, the innovation that happens can be incredible,” said Joe Vezzani, CEO. by LunarCrush, in a statement to PR Newswire.

“Our goal is to inspire people to build communities that will unlock a new era of exploration,” he said. “We envision classrooms, groups, companies, and even DAOs [decentralized autonomous organizations, referring to an organization running on blockchain] come together to reach the Moon and share the treasure chest’s rewards. It’s like Willy Wonka’s ‘golden ticket’ to the Web3 era, and we couldn’t be more excited to see how it all plays out.”

It’s a surprising comparison: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a fairly well-known story about how purity of heart can triumph over greed and determination. Should someone end up winning Bitcoins, on the other hand, they have to be the kind of person or group who can drop at least seven figures on a pet project that might earn them back 10 percent of their spend.

So, less Charlie, more Veruca Salt. And we all know how that ended, don’t we?