SpaceX just launched the world's first cryptocurrency satellite

The world's first "crypto satellite" is now in orbit.

SpaceX kicked off its fifth small carpool mission, Transporter-5, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida yesterday, May 25, at 2:35 p.m. PT. ET (1953 GMT).

Shortly after launching into low Earth orbit (LEO), the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket returned to land at Cape Canaveral.

Crypto-1

Notably, the shared mission launched the world's first "cryptocurrency satellite," an exciting milestone for a company whose CEO Elon Musk is deeply embedded in the money culture. cryptocurrency, and just this week, news surfaced that someone impersonating Musk is scamming crypto holders.

The satellite, called 'Crypto-1', was designed by US satellite startup Cryptosat to lay the groundwork for blockchain-related secure cryptography in space, according to a report from Forbes India Degree.

The small satellite is roughly the size of a coffee cup, and it's built with loose parts. Since it will be inaccessible in space and it will relay open communications, no one can interfere with the system and anyone with an antenna can listen to the satellite's transmissions. It will be used to launch secure blockchain and Web3 platforms.

Cryptosat has performed several tests on the International Space Station to investigate data security applications in space. In March, the company tested the Drand protocol, the internet's first publicly verifiable randomness signal, on the orbiting station.

“We are basically joining the Uber of spaceships,” Cryptosat co-founder Yonatan Winetraub told Cointelegraph in an interview. "Everybody went into the same orbit and we were one of the passengers."

"SpaceX launches a bunch of satellites, each doing something different," he added, "It doesn't matter to our service, we hope to use our satellites to provide cryptographic services for our customers here on Earth. no interference with other satellites."

The first out-of-this-world trusted source

Cryptosat's other co-founder, Yan Michalevsky, said that Crypto1's security adoption is the world's first (root-of-trust) in space and it won't depend on other satellites run by other companies. build. One interesting potential application that Michalevsky highlighted is that Crypto1 could be used for zero-knowledge protocols, which are increasingly being used for online voting systems.

“There is a lot of demand for this,” Michalevsky told CoinTelegraph. "We're looking at protocols, especially in Web3, that have a whole financial system and a smart contract system, the kind of digital legal agreement that depends on the trustworthiness of the cryptography behind it. it." Michaelevsky also noted that Crypto1 could enable the first deployment of an entire blockchain from space, with communications done over radio frequencies.

Shortly after the successful launch of Transporter-5, Musk shared an image on Twitter (shown above) of Falcon 9's early stage booster upon landing with the caption "humans for scale".

SpaceX's Transporter-5 mission also carried NASA's Pathfinder-3 Tech Demonstrator spacecraft and several test payloads. In total, the mission deployed 39 different payloads. Some of these will deploy additional small craft in the coming weeks, bringing the total number of spacecraft launched by Transporter-5 to 59.