A Bitcoin Wallet Is Orbiting the Earth at 5 Miles Per Second

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA - At exactly 12:29 EST on Thursday, a crypto wallet built by developers at SpaceChain hurtled into the stratosphere aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

When it arrived at the International Space Station, the 1kg node - only a fraction of SpaceX CRS-19 resupply mission's 2,600kg payload - became the first active bitcoin node on the ISS.For SpaceChain, the launch is a step forward in its mission of building out a robust, decentralized blockchain infrastructure high above the Earth.

SpaceChain sees its nodes as a radical new way to make crypto transactions more secure.

The wallet will play a small but important part in that long-term goal, said to Zee Zheng, SpaceChain's CEO and co-founder.

SpaceChain declined to state how much payload space and research and development cost.

SpaceChain's open-source protocol had to be vetted by NASA and retrofitted for the station's unique plug architecture, Zheng said.

Garzik was one of the early bitcoin core developers and he led SpaceChain's effort to build out the software soon to be integrated with the ISS. He's also been thinking about blockchain in space even before SpaceChain founded, said Zheng.

"About five years ago in the bitcointalk forum, Jeff wrote an article about bitcoin in space," said Zheng.

This new wallet will operate independently of SpaceChain's past launches.

In 10 years, perhaps, SpaceChain will deploy a network of dedicated satellites that "Speak to each other" and run far more blockchain infrastructure than any single ISS wallet ever could, said Zheng.