Pantera Partner: The space race urgently needs a blockchain trust layer

Author: Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner of Pantera Capital; Translation: Shaw, Golden Finance

Summary

• SpaceX IPO momentum is strong: SpaceX set the offering price at $135 per share, raising $75 billion, with a company valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion based on the offering price. The stock ticker SPCX listed on NASDAQ, setting a record as the world's largest IPO in history.

• Blockchain × Space Industry: On the day of NASDAQ listing, Backpack completed SPCX tokenization on the Solana blockchain, building the first native on-chain trading infrastructure for this historic IPO, marking the official integration of traditional space assets with on-chain infrastructure.

• Core Opportunities: Starlink is currently SpaceX’s only profitable business, but its $1.6 trillion potential market size (TAM) is a conservative estimate, and the actual incremental space is far beyond that. The layered ecosystem of orbital logistics, spectrum resources, lunar relay communications, and autonomous unmanned systems is the core deployment scenario for blockchain and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). Three portfolio companies under Pantera — GEODNET, OpenMind, and World — are building the trust infrastructure for the entire space industry.

By 2025, the global space economy is projected to reach $626 billion, surpassing $1 trillion by 2034. Last Friday, SpaceX listed on NASDAQ under the ticker SPCX, with an offering price of $135, opening at about $150; on June 12, the first-day closing price was approximately $161, a nearly 19% increase in a single day.

Most market participants overlooked a key piece of information: On the same day as NASDAQ listing, Backpack issued a tokenized SPCX product on Solana, supporting on-chain trading and redemption of the underlying stock. The largest IPO in history was accompanied by native blockchain trading infrastructure from day one.

Regardless of how the market views its valuation, this listing marks a structural turning point in the industry — traditional space assets are now fully entering the institutional investment horizon. SpaceX’s satellite internet business, Starlink, is the group’s only profit-generating segment, and its disclosed $1.6 trillion potential market size is still conservative. This estimate only covers fixed broadband and mobile communications, excluding secondary supporting economies such as drone swarms, space robotics, cross-orbit and ground-to-space machine-to-machine logistics networks, and satellite constellations connecting all sectors. All these systems require a robust multi-party collaboration infrastructure, which centralized institutions cannot build independently.

There is no single authoritative regulator in space. Blockchain thus becomes an indispensable underlying infrastructure.

Industry Pain Points No One Mentions

SpaceX’s S-1 prospectus positions Starlink as a “universal roaming partner” for mobile operators, revealing a planetary-scale coordination challenge. All operators—T-Mobile, Optus (Australia), Rogers Communications, KDDI, Vefon Telecom, etc.—have independent billing systems, authentication protocols, and partnership frameworks. Every device handoff between ground stations and Starlink satellites, as well as cross-national satellite handoffs and interactions with other mobile operators, require session measurement, identity verification, revenue sharing, and settlement, with logs retained for audits and disputes.

Currently, the industry relies solely on bilateral agreements and manual spreadsheet reconciliation for settlements: a slow process, high costs, and opaque information. A peer-reviewed study in the 2026 issue of IEEE’s Blockchain journal shows that smart contract-based roaming settlements can reduce reconciliation cycles from days to near real-time, generating verifiable audit logs for both parties without relying on internal records.

This pain point aligns perfectly with the difficulties faced by Starlink. SpaceX and its industry competitors cannot make telecom operators unconditionally trust their billing flows. A neutral distributed ledger that records every communication session, signal handoff, and micro-payment, without any party having full control, is the optimal solution.

Spectrum resources have become market-priced assets

Before enabling multi-party collaboration, major operators must define spectrum usage entities and time slots. Spectrum refers to the radio frequency bands used for satellite and ground station signal transmission, a finite resource under strict regulation. As more companies enter the space, spectrum management complexity rivals that of commercial operations relying on spectrum.

When the FCC approved EchoStar’s operating license, it imposed strict performance, capacity, and spectrum utilization efficiency standards; meanwhile, AT&T holds its own spectrum assets, and AST SpaceMobile was approved to deploy up to 248 direct-to-phone satellites, with multiple companies competing for the same spectrum band.

Interference disputes, spectrum rights conflicts, and compliance audits have become routine. A blockchain-based spectrum custody system is a natural solution: all operators’ spectrum usage records are entered into an auditable shared ledger, bound by licensing terms. Regulators no longer need to fully rely on self-reported data from companies, and operators don’t have to trust competitors’ internal records. An IEEE paper in 2024 on fault-tolerant spectrum consensus for LEO satellites confirms that permissioned distributed ledgers can coordinate multi-party spectrum use even in environments with signal interference and noisy channels.

Spectrum, bandwidth, computing power, electricity, and navigation data are gradually becoming tradable infrastructure. When multiple operators and autonomous unmanned systems share these resources, a neutral trust infrastructure is urgently needed, and blockchain is designed for this purpose.

The Moon Economy Naturally Adopts a Multi-Actor Co-Construction Model

The coordination challenges in low Earth orbit have extended to lunar activities. Unlike LEO, the lunar industry has been designed from the outset with a multi-actor collaboration architecture. NASA’s LunaNet and ESA’s Moonlight projects emphasize interoperability among national agencies and commercial enterprises. The company Intuitive Machines (ticker: LUNR) secured a roughly $4.8 billion NASA contract to build the world’s first commercial lunar relay satellite; ESA’s lunar explorer is scheduled for launch in late 2026; China’s Queqiao-2 relay satellite has been operational since 2024. In the short term, these three core systems will achieve interoperability, resource sharing, and fee settlement.

The lunar network’s fifth edition standards only specify interoperability protocols, deliberately leaving fee settlement and resource rights coordination to operators. As lunar relay durations, navigation data, and computing power become tradable commodities, transaction volumes will far exceed the limits of traditional paper contracts. Given the high geopolitical sensitivity of these activities, a single entity cannot control the settlement ledger.

A neutral blockchain distributed ledger is the optimal solution. Companies that pioneer building this system will dominate the core infrastructure of the lunar economy.

DePIN and Current Deployment Projects

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) are among the most underestimated directions in the blockchain frontier. Their business model is clear: no single enterprise needs to fully own all ground stations, gateways, and nodes; token incentives attract independent operators to build and maintain infrastructure, with on-chain systems automatically handling payments and service quality verification.

Starlink covers 164 countries, but its overall architecture is highly centralized. In regions with urgent network needs—rural Sub-Saharan Africa, remote Pacific islands, conflict zones—traditional deployment yields low returns, discouraging companies from investing.

Spacecoin offers a new solution: using satellites to securely transmit data over 7,000 km between Chile and the Azores; BitRezus developed Astropledge, a real-time consensus mechanism for untrusted space partners; WISeSat.Space completed the world’s first in-orbit post-quantum blockchain transaction in January 2025. Given the current satellite encryption systems face quantum cracking risks, this milestone is significant.

Larger market opportunities lie ahead. Idle computing power generated by low Earth orbit satellites crossing oceans and remote areas can be sold as commodities. Blockchain’s high-frequency, small-value transaction settlement can address the inefficiencies of traditional contracts, without any biased arbitration party.

Three Pantera portfolio projects are building the foundational infrastructure for the space industry

The core pain point of the space economy—devices from different manufacturers collaborating in an untrusted environment, verifying identities, and trading assets—is the main focus of these three companies Pantera invests in.

GEODNET ($GEOD) is building a decentralized positioning infrastructure for autonomous and self-driving systems. The network consists of globally operated reference stations, providing centimeter-level real-time differential GNSS (RTK GNSS) accuracy, along with real-time space weather correction data. These capabilities are essential for satellite handoffs, lunar relay communications, drone swarms, and orbital robotics, which traditional GPS cannot achieve.

The project incentivizes distributed hardware operators with tokens to participate in network formation, creating a highly resilient, tamper-proof navigation data source that no single entity can fully control or audit. In space scenarios, spectrum coordination and machine-to-machine logistics heavily depend on precise timing and positioning, making this infrastructure fundamentally valuable.

OpenMind (a $20 million funding round led by Pantera in 2025) is developing a decentralized operational system for intelligent devices. Its FABRIC protocol is a universal, hardware-adaptive operating system enabling different manufacturers’ robots to share data, verify identities, and coordinate tasks without centralized platforms.

Founded by Stanford bioengineering Ph.D. Yang Liphart, he states: “If AI is the brain, and robot hardware is the body, then the coordination system is the nervous system.” Extending this logic to space scenarios, its adaptability is evident. The challenges of connecting low Earth orbit satellites, lunar relays, and drone swarms are core to the FABRIC protocol.

Circle has partnered with OpenMind to enable automatic USDC payments between robots, marking the arrival of the machine economy era.

World (formerly Worldcoin, a Pantera portfolio company) is building the next layer of infrastructure: as devices autonomously collaborate and trade in orbit, distinguishing human from AI identities becomes essential. World runs a human identity verification protocol on its native Layer 2 network, Worldchain, enabling cryptographic trusted identity verification while preserving privacy.

In an environment of widespread autonomous agents, human-initiated actions must be provable, not just subjectively inferred. Co-founder Sam Altman emphasized that this infrastructure is critical in an AI-saturated internet, and the lunar environment will further amplify this need.

GEODNET provides high-precision positioning and navigation, OpenMind handles device coordination, and World addresses human identity verification. Together, they form a trust foundation and operational ecosystem for emerging space economies.

Focus on Key Tracks

Swarm Coordination Protocols: Seemingly simple but indispensable software, enabling robot swarms from different operators to reach consensus on tasks and resource allocation, akin to TCP/IP in the autonomous device domain. OpenMind’s FABRIC is the most promising project in this track.

Tokenization of Orbital Assets: Satellite bandwidth, launch capacity, orbital positions, and future space mining rights can be tokenized and traded on on-chain markets, potentially transforming space resource access much like DeFi reshaped traditional currencies. SpaceX’s SPCX tokenization on IPO day is a real-world validation of this demand.

Device Identity and Data Traceability: Creating encrypted identities for devices, recording their origins, operators, commands, and actions, to resolve disputes and liability issues in commercial space. World and OpenMind are leading projects in this foundational infrastructure.

Autonomous Settlement Layer: Micro-payments for computing power, electricity, navigation services, and relay communications—automatically settled—will extend decentralized finance into space. Pioneers like Cryptosat and SpaceChain have already explored deployment pathways.

Core Conclusions

Blockchain will not be the focus of SpaceX’s IPO publicity, but the teams quietly building the underlying operational infrastructure for cutting-edge space technology are the ones worth watching.

The optimal architecture is not to upload all telemetry data to a public chain but to adopt a layered approach: store high-value critical events (key rotations, firmware approvals, communication session logs, spectrum logs) on permissioned ledgers, while massive raw data is stored off-chain, with smart contracts triggering automatic settlements when thresholds are met. A 2025 study by OrbitChain confirms this architecture can achieve sub-second transaction finality in space environments.

SpaceX’s S-1 positions itself as a platform company, and success depends on shared trust infrastructure. The internet relies on SSL encryption and DNS for scalability; the financial industry is rapidly evolving through distributed ledgers; the space industry will face a similar industry inflection point.