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

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

Summary

• SpaceX IPO Gains Momentum: SpaceX set the IPO price at $135 per share, raising $75 billion. Based on the offering price, the company's valuation is approximately $1.75 trillion. The stock ticker SPCX debuted on NASDAQ, setting a record as the largest IPO in history worldwide.

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

• Core Opportunities: Starlink is currently SpaceX’s only profitable business, but its $1.6 trillion potential market size (TAM) is a conservative estimate. The real growth potential extends far beyond. Multi-party collaboration layers such as orbital logistics, spectrum resources, lunar relay communications, and autonomous unmanned systems are key on-chain infrastructure scenarios enabled by blockchain and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). Three portfolio companies under Pantera Capital—GEODNET, OpenMind, and World—are building the foundational trust systems for the 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 IPO price of $135, opening at around $150; on June 12, the first-day closing price was about $161, a nearly 19% increase in a single day.

Most market participants overlooked a key detail: 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 values it, this IPO marks a structural turning point in the industry, with space assets officially entering the institutional investment arena. SpaceX’s satellite internet business, Starlink, is the group’s only profitable segment, and its $1.6 trillion potential market is still a conservative estimate. This figure only covers fixed broadband and mobile communications, excluding secondary supporting economies such as drone swarms, space robotics, cross-orbit and ground-to-orbit logistics networks, and satellite constellations connecting all sectors. All these systems require robust multi-party collaboration infrastructure, which centralized institutions cannot build alone.

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. Operators like T-Mobile, Optus, Rogers, KDDI, and Vefon each have independent billing systems, authentication protocols, and partnership agreements. Every device handoff between ground stations and Starlink satellites, or across international satellite networks and other mobile operators, requires session measurement, identity verification, revenue sharing, and audit logs for dispute resolution.

Currently, the industry relies solely on bilateral agreements and manual spreadsheet reconciliation for settlements: a slow process, costly, and opaque. A peer-reviewed study in the 2026 issue of IEEE Blockchain 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 Starlink faces. SpaceX and its industry competitors cannot make telecom operators trust their billing flows unconditionally. A neutral, distributed ledger that records every communication session, signal handoff, and micro-payment in an immutable, tamper-proof manner—without any single party controlling the data—is the optimal solution.

Spectrum Resources Have Become Market-Price Assets

Before achieving multi-party collaboration, operators must define spectrum usage rights and time slots. Spectrum is the radio frequency band used for satellite and ground station transmissions, a finite resource under strict regulation. As more companies enter the space, managing spectrum has become as complex as the commercial activities relying on it.

When the FCC approved EchoStar’s operating license, it imposed strict performance metrics on speed, capacity, and spectrum efficiency; meanwhile, AT&T controls its own spectrum, and AST SpaceMobile has been 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 are now routine. A blockchain-based spectrum management system is a natural solution: all operators’ spectrum usage records are stored in an auditable, shared ledger linked to licensing terms. Regulators no longer need to fully rely on self-reported data, and operators don’t have to trust competitors’ internal records. An IEEE paper in 2024 confirmed 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 layer is urgently needed—and blockchain is designed for this purpose.

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

The coordination challenges faced in low Earth orbit have extended to the lunar sector. Unlike near-Earth space, lunar industry planning has always emphasized multi-actor collaboration. NASA’s LunaNet and ESA’s Moonlight programs both stress interoperability among national agencies and commercial enterprises. Companies like Intuitive Machines (ticker: LUNR) have secured about $4.8 billion in NASA contracts to build the world’s first commercial lunar relay satellite; ESA’s Moonlight mission is scheduled for 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 fifth edition of lunar network standards only sets interoperability protocols, deliberately leaving fee and resource rights management to operators. As lunar relay services, navigation data, and computing resources become tradable commodities, transaction volumes will far exceed traditional paper contracts, and due to their high geopolitical sensitivity, no single entity can control the settlement ledger.

A neutral, blockchain-based distributed ledger is the optimal solution. Companies that pioneer building this infrastructure will dominate the foundational layer of the lunar economy.

DePIN and Current Projects

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) are among the most underestimated sectors in blockchain. 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 automating payments and service verification.

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

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

The larger market opportunity lies ahead. Low Earth orbit satellites crossing oceans and remote areas generate vast amounts of idle computing power, which can be sold as commodities. Blockchain’s high-frequency, small-value transaction settlement can address the inefficiencies of traditional contracts, without any biased arbitration authority.

Pantera’s Portfolio Projects Building the Space Industry’s Complete Infrastructure

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

GEODNET ($GEOD) is building a decentralized positioning infrastructure for autonomous and self-operating systems. The network consists of globally operated reference stations, providing centimeter-level real-time differential GNSS (RTK GNSS) accuracy and real-time space weather correction data. These capabilities are essential for satellite handoffs, lunar relay communications, drone swarms, and orbital robotics—areas where traditional GPS falls short.

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

OpenMind (which completed a $20 million funding round led by Pantera in 2025) is developing a decentralized operating system for intelligent devices. Its FABRIC protocol enables different manufacturers’ robots to share data, verify identities, and coordinate tasks without centralized intermediaries.

Founded by Stanford bioengineer 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, the protocol addresses the core challenges of inter-device connectivity in low Earth orbit, lunar relay networks, and drone swarms.

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

World (formerly Worldcoin, a Pantera portfolio company) is building the next layer of infrastructure: as devices autonomously coordinate and trade in orbit, distinguishing human from AI identities becomes essential. World’s native layer-2 network, Worldchain, runs human identity verification protocols that protect privacy while enabling cryptographic trust.

In an environment of widespread autonomous agents, human authorization 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, OpenMind handles device coordination, and World verifies human identities—forming a trust and operational foundation for the emerging space economy.

Focus on Key Sectors

Swarm Collaboration Protocols: Seemingly minor but essential software, enabling robot swarms from different operators to reach consensus on tasks and resource allocation—akin to TCP/IP for autonomous devices. OpenMind’s FABRIC is the most promising project in this sector.

Tokenization of Orbital Assets: Satellite bandwidth, launch capacity, orbital positions, and future space mining rights can be tokenized and traded on blockchain markets, potentially transforming space resource access much like DeFi reshaped traditional finance. SpaceX’s SPCX IPO’s immediate tokenization on day one confirms market demand.

Device Identity and Data Traceability: Creating encrypted identities for devices, recording their origin, operators, commands, and actions to resolve disputes and assign responsibilities in commercial space activities. World and OpenMind are leading projects in this foundational layer.

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

Key Conclusions

Blockchain may not be the headline of SpaceX’s IPO, but the teams quietly building the underlying operational infrastructure for cutting-edge space technology are the real focus.

The optimal architecture isn’t uploading all telemetry data to a public chain but adopting a layered approach: storing high-value events (key rotations, firmware approvals, communication logs, spectrum logs) on permissioned ledgers, while massive raw data is stored off-chain. Smart contracts trigger automatic settlements when thresholds are met. A 2025 study by OrbitChain confirmed this architecture can achieve sub-second transaction finality in space environments.

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