So, I thought with the first post, I could briefly summarize where I started to now - the current state of where I am.
Trickling into it
This journey started in 2010 when an acquaintance of mine at my university dorm mentioned Bitcoin to me. The talk was about self sovereignty but I was busy with other things like classes, university social clubs and a girl. I was trying to live a life I was told to live by society. I ignored it and then later just after graduation, I came across it again in 2013. Got gifted a few cents worth to play around and I thought it was nice and still a novelty since I had loans and bills to pay and a space industry career to make happen for myself that seemed more important at the time. I came across it again in 2014 when it was Blockchain not Bitcoin and in all these three instances, I was at a brief point in my life where I was in the “gutter” mentally and emotionally either because of the girl or a health crisis.
Early Days
Eventually, came 2016 the year of my last full time job with a space company and the discovery of Bitcoin again. This time, I went in because after two to three times, the verse must be saying something to me. I helped people setup wallets while I worked beyond full time hours at the company that I eventually left. I started freelancing and helped setup the Blockchain Association of New Zealand with 10 other wide-eyed naïve people with the ethos of decentralization and censorship resistance. And like most things in New Zealand, this quickly turned into a corporate environment and Corda and Hyperledger were the talk of the town.
When I heard the concept of a smart contract, I knew this would be a game changer in the space industry. Why? We could finally take the space community into the Metcalf era. Imagine funding your own personalised missions for personalised services all with cryptoeconomic rails powered by smart contracts. Although, now those thoughts have evolved considerably on what smart contracts could do for the space community.
A Brief Space History Primer Segway
The space community started with Sputnik (now called traditional space or Old Space) giving us a lot of wins by both the former Soviet Union and the U.S. culminating with humans setting on the Moon, a reusable space launch vehicle/shuttle and an International Space Station. But, one of the downsides of these were turn around times - slow - as in, projects would take years if not decades. The James Webb Telescope as an example.
But this change starting with SpaceX and the CubeSat standard that realized and harnessed Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law. Over time they and others brought down the costs of launch, satellite manufacturing and increased the frequency of space launches and the number of satellites in orbit. While, they always like to claim that they’ve democratized access, they really didn’t - they brought costs down for smaller players to get in the game. Democracy involves everyone having the right to vote on something. This is where networks help and smart contracts aid in this computational event of the right to vote.
Metcalf’s law is primarily about network effects - think Big Tech companies and other social networks. In the space industry you see this already happening with companies like Satsearch, Precious Payloads, Valispace, Leaf Space to name a few. Most of these are small space startups but are creating network effects within the space community. This new Metcalf era creates space communities that can be created and governed by the network actors, taking the space industry into the Metcalf era. This enables a lot more than just communities but also efficient global cooperation on space projects among countries, companies and universities by using political economic railways of the internet. There are plenty of organisations from countries through to companies and universities researching the use of blockchain. I had one on my podcast as a two-episode series. This is also something Clayming Space researches - digital politico-economic infrastructure for a United Federation of Planets.
The State of Affairs
After four years of pondering, dipping my toes into crypto and blockchain while paying the bills and my loans off, I finally got frustrated and started Clayming Space in 2018 as a hobby - to keep in touch with my space network; focus on diverse voices in the space community; keep learning, engaged and informed about the space community and; looking at the social science aspects of the industry - something not considered in any STEM programme. I discovered the Token Engineering Community in 2020 that gave light to creating a standardised practice of creating cryptoeconomic systems while also looking at creating cryptoeconomic primitives and a tech stack for the public commons like fisheries, forests, oceans, etc. based on Elinor Ostrom’s work. Something I truly enjoyed and resonated with via doing my podcast whenever I tried to get guests on to discuss crowded orbits, space ethics, cultural and heritage management and more. It was the one community I would visit once a day to see what people were posting to read their work.
I got inspired by this and in 2021 decided to go into it a bit more full time tackling the first of many issues in the space industry - crowded orbits. The month of January was hectic, trying to read as much as I could about different aspects of Space Traffic Management, Space Debris Mitigation and Space Situational Awareness. On top of that, I was going through token engineering paradigms and some bonding curve literature that could fit with making long-term space sustainability possible to ensure our orbits weren’t prone to a Kessler event. While, I did get to a point of figuring out an economic design pattern to create a cryptoeconomic system where actors in Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) could be incentivized to ensure a harmonious traffic management protocol using a complex adaptive model, the linchpin was spacecraft identity and this was where I had to put a brief pause to this idea.
In this Moment
After putting a pause on the crowded orbits research by the first week of February, I decided to pursue (something more simple? 🤔🤨😵🥴) - a space commodities exchange. An exchange where users could trade air, water and fuel tokens. After a few days, I thought, this could not be simply ERC-20 tokens that were volatile like the prices of most Layer 1 and 2 tokens. These are critical commodities in the space environment. They had to be something more algorithmically stable based on a set of parameters that help determine this stability. At first, I thought, prices of other crypto assets like top 10 or 50 or 100 by market capitalization. But, does this provide price stability? Is there price stability when someone buys an index fund of the S&P500?
Well, these thoughts are still going on in my head and will be modeled into the space exchange - currently named Kuxaku Fotet meaning ‘trading in vacuum/space’ in Lang Belta. Even as I explore this, I find, I come across the same linchpin I came across when dealing with crowded orbits problem - spacecraft identity. It seems I can’t get rid of it and in fact, I don’t have to start another project like I did before because what if you could trade spacecraft identity on the space exchange - Kuxaku Fotet?
In the next article, I’ll be exploring this, my thoughts on using NFTs for identity and looking at what’s out there, that I use to model and prototype spacecraft identity.