Why a payload of NFTs was just sent to the International Space Station

Crypto developers often talk about their favorite coin or token pumping “to the moon”, but NFT assets have actually been sent up into space. On Thursday, the latest example – from the Solana NFT project Infinity Labs – will see a collection of NFTs from a number of Web3 projects burst into orbit via the International Space Station.

In an exclusive interview with DecryptInfinity Eve – the pseudonymous founder of Infinity Labs – said one of her inspirations for sending NFTs into space was the 1977 Voyager Mission, which included a “Golden Record” inscribed with music from around the world, including Chuck Berry, Mozart, Bach , and Louis Armstrong.

She got the idea for Dreambound Orbital during the pandemic, when she says she was in the hospital for treatment for an aggressive form of cancer.

“I didn’t want to look at statistics [during treatment] because it was the worst thing I could do,” Eve shared Decrypt. “And I was obsessed with this idea that if I could put art and stories on the blockchain, I could build something really beautiful that could survive me in some ways if something were to happen to me.”

Dreambound Orbital, a company that “launches blockchain experiments into orbit,” is the result. When researching how to send NFTs into space, Eve says she emailed several people who work in the space industry and eventually connected with NASA and visited the space center in Houston, Texas.

Designed by Nanoracks, The Bishop Airlock is an addition to the International Space Station (ISS) infrastructure that enables commercial exploitation of the ISS. “Now we were able to make it happen,” said Eve.

And for the first mission, DreamboundM1, she has brought along a number of prominent Web3 allies. With Infinity Labs’ NFT in its mission to the International Space Station, NFT funds have been contributed by Solana Foundation, Metaplex, Phantom, Brave, Magic Eden, OpenSea, World of Women, MonkeDAO, Fractal, DeGods, Randi Zuckerberg and more.

“I thought to myself: What is it about space that really inspires people, or just brings people together in so many ways,” she said, “and also inspires people to think outside of themselves, or just feel like they’re part of something bigger?”

The NFTs included in the payload include artwork previously auctioned by the Magic Eden marketplace called “This is Solana”, created by pseudonymous artists TEJ and Ekko. It refers to many popular projects on the platform.

Other NFTs on the mission include Metaplex’s Solana NFT standard whitepaper (tokenized itself as an NFT), a World of Women Galaxy profile picture, and the first Solana NFT minted by the crypto-friendly browser Brave. Holders of Infinity Labs’ NFTs can also send their name or that of a loved one as part of the payload.

While Dreambound is the latest outfit to send digital art into space, it’s not the first. In August 2021, a pair of NFTs were sent to the ISS via the Bishop Airlock, including Aku artwork from former baseball player turned digital artist Micah Johnson. September’s Inspiration4 private spaceflight via SpaceX also included NFTs, including music from the band Kings of Leon.

Although Infinity Labs is a Solana NFT project, the digital payload of the space spans both Solana and Ethereum NFT. The NFT files were uploaded to a server on the ISS today, where they will complete a rotation around Earth before being “beamed into neighboring systems,” Eve said.

One of Dreambound’s primary goals in sending NFTs to the ISS, she explained, is to send the images into deep space like the Voyager satellite before it, and perhaps one day enable a digital space economy and an orbiting NFT museum.

Some may find the idea of ​​NFTs being sent to the International Space Station a silly or unnecessary idea. To such criticism, Eve said to keep an open mind – you never know where inspiration might come from. Many critical technologies today were enabled via experiments in space, such as GPS.

“It starts with something that seems silly or crazy; those things develop over time,” she said. “The potential use case is to be able to generate validated certificates of flight for assets that went to the ISS, or that have interacted with space in some way.”

Beyond Web3 applications, Eve believes there could be useful commercial applications and research for such an initiative, adding that life often imitates art and science fiction. Sci-fi inspired many of the technologies we use today, including smartphones. How can Web3 technology do the same?

“The line we have on Orbital is, ‘Despite everything, humanity found time to dream,’ Eve said. “Because Web3 meant a lot to me, it allowed me to reinvent myself and heal. I wanted to put [this] together for the Web3 community.”