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I<\/abbr>t\u2019s just before midnight on a rainy autumn Friday. Paul Chou and his entourage dodge puddles on the runway of the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey as they board a Gulfstream private jet bound for Las Vegas. The flight attendant cracks open a bottle of champagne and with a nod welcomes the passengers aboard. The girls disappear into the back and emerge minutes later wearing sequined cocktail dresses and feather boas. Sensing she\u2019s in for a party, the attendant offers a round of tequila shots just as the inertia from the plane taking off to the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, forces her laughing into her seat.<\/p>\n Ostensibly, Chou, 38, is celebrating not only his birthday but the sale for an undisclosed amount of LedgerX, the ground-breaking bitcoin derivatives firm he co-founded with his wife in 2013. As the plane levels off at 45,000 feet, traveling at nearly the speed of sound, Chou hits play on the plane\u2019s sound system, blaring Fuckin\u2019 Problems<\/em> by A$AP Rocky. He unlocks a black Halliburton briefcase handcuffed to a slender brunette in thigh-high stiletto boots and strikes a pose as he reveals his Audemars Piguet watch, and several plastic baggies obscured by $70,000 worth of hundred-dollar bills.<\/p>\n But the celebration is bittersweet and feels more like what Chou thinks should have been than what it actually was. Three years earlier, just as LedgerX was on the verge of getting historic regulatory permission to trade bitcoin futures, Chou published a fiery tirade against the very regulators he\u2019d been working with for years, getting him and his co-founder wife, fired in the process. Away from the festivities, through a pair of automatic doors that separate the main cabin from a smaller vestibule nearer the cockpit, the mood on the plane changes. Kid Cudi\u2019s ironic anthem, Pursuit of Happiness,<\/em> plays over the sound system and Chou sinks into an oversized, champagne-colored recliner. <\/p>\n Foundation Coin founder Paul Chou (leff) celebrates with friends on a private jet from New York to Las Vegas to celebrate his birthday and (right) emerging in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n Michael del Castillo<\/small> As he stares out the window the lights of New York City disappear around the inky curvature of the Earth behind him. His eyes flicker as if his thoughts have shifted from what might have been to what might be. \u201cThere’s a nonzero chance the Earth is doomed,\u201d says Chou, his voice cracking with emotion. \u201cWe should have a backup plan.\u201d For entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, that backup plan is increasingly in outer space, where Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX hopes to have tens of thousands of people living by 2040. The moguls are leading the charge to build what Morgan Stanley predicts will be a $1 trillion space economy that same year. <\/p>\n But Chou is concerned these billionaires\u2019 work runs the very serious risk of importing the same preconceived notions and biases that colonists have brought with them for millennia. To subvert the old aphorism that trade follows the flag, he is raising capital from a syndicate of MIT grads to build his next project, Foundation Coin, a new category of digital assets that like bitcoin doesn\u2019t rely on any government, and depending on your interpretation of the law, finally and truly escapes the reach of those meddling regulators. But unlike bitcoin, Foundation is being designed from the ground up to settle transactions on any planet (or moon) in the Solar System. If successful, when the first bodega, or brothel, or bank sets up shop on the moon or Mars\u2014or any other planet surrounding the sun\u2014it will have a new kind of money, void of colonial baggage, ready and waiting.<\/p>\n \u201cMars is a unique, blank slate starting point where we can try something from scratch,\u201d says Chou. \u201cSo we should treat it as such, and then take all the advantages and use that speed that’s going to be necessary for those intrepid people that go there to move as quickly as possible. And we just need a financial bridge to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n I<\/abbr>n the vacuum that resulted from Chou being forced out of LedgerX in 2019, he started looking anew at an old idea he\u2019d dabbled with years before, called StarCoin. What began as an idea to use starlight to create a unique cryptocurrency key by pegging each oscillation of a light wave to a one or a zero, slowly evolved into an idea for a constellation of satellites that would let anyone spend bitcoin without an internet signal, before settling into a new kind of cryptocurrency that could be spent on any planet in the solar system. <\/p>\n While it takes less than a second for light to travel around the earth, making it relatively easy to sync up transactions on a terrestrial distributed ledger, it takes an average<\/a> of 28 minutes for a signal to reach Mars, making it impossible using current tech to ensure the same cryptocurrency isn\u2019t spent on two planets at once. It\u2019s called the double-spend problem.<\/p>\n Former LedgerX employee Mohamed Mohamud brainstorms ideas at a hotel in Atlantic City (left) and a white boarding session at LedgerX’s offices just before Chou left for the last time (right).<\/p>\n Judy Tsai, Juthica Chou<\/small> After helping a few LedgerX staffers who lost their jobs in the weeks following his ouster Chou booked a hotel room in Atlantic City and held a brainstorming session on a whiteboard away from the chaos of New York. \u201cWe did math and crypto in a suite,\u201d says Chou. \u201cThen played blackjack at night.\u201d The result was a new kind of consensus mechanism that takes into account the time it takes for light to travel from planet to planet at any given point in their orbits around the sun. <\/p>\n \u201cWe know how the speed of light works depending on how close Mars is to Earth at any given point,\u201d he says. \u201cNow it’s a coding problem.\u201d <\/p>\n Then, last October, Chou got a call from LedgerX\u2019s first investor: his mom. She still owned equity in the company and had just learned it was being sold to FTX, which is in the process of adapting its licenses to sell highly lucrative leveraged futures. \u201cIt’s obviously gonna be totally huge for the business,\u201d says FTX co-founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, \u201cIf and when that happens.\u201d While terms of Chou\u2019s departure from LedgerX are being kept under tight wraps, he says the sale ended up yielding at least a 10X return for his mother, turning her $100,000 seed investment into a seven-figure sum. <\/p>\n The real celebration, however, didn’t start until the following day when his old LedgerX investors, friends from MIT and elsewhere started to call him, asking about his next project? One previous investor told him in a text: \u201cLet it ride.\u201d Jameel Khalfan, a business developer at Google, and a former classmate of Chou\u2019s who calls him one of the smartest people at MIT, has closed his first investment in the firm for undisclosed terms. He\u2019s now gathering a group of Chou\u2019s former classmates, previous investors in LedgerX and others to form a special purpose vehicle with the sole purpose of backing the firm.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery kind of building project, every pizza restaurant that’s open requires some sort of financial resources, whether dollars or yen or euros or whatever,\u201d says Chou. \u201cAnd if we’re going to build that infrastructure on other planets, we need to rethink how that financial system works.\u201d \u201cIf you could design this whole financial system from scratch, what does that look like?\u201d adds Khalfan. \u201cTo me, that’s the really exciting part.\u201d <\/p>\n Rechristened Foundation Coin after the Isaac Asimov novel about humanity exploring the furthest reaches of the Milky Way, the cryptocurrency is now much more than scribbles on a whiteboard. Chou calls Foundation Coin Inc, a \u201cDARPA for cryptocurrencies,\u201d inspired by the U.S. State Department\u2019s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that laid the foundation for decades-long projects, leading to the creation of the internet, GPS and other \u201cout there\u201d technologies. <\/p>\n Based in New York, Chou\u2019s team of a half-dozen theoretical mathematicians, computer engineers and blockchain developers from the NSA, NASA and Google are figuring out how to build a new financial infrastructure that helps groups of strangers on different planets avoid the double-spend problem without the need of middlemen. Bitcoin solves this problem by using what\u2019s called a consensus mechanism, known as proof of work, that rewards a network of computers that audit the transactions, sometimes taking a few minutes, other times longer than a day. Chou likens this to a traditional race to a finish line. <\/p>\n \u201cWhoever happens to get their first wins,\u201d he says. But given the great distances in space, Foundation will need more precision. An early version of the white paper describing the technology lays out what Chou calls \u201ctransition blocks\u201d that offset the delays resulting from planets revolving at varying distances around the sun. These blocks flip the race concept on its head with what Chou calls proof-of-timed-work. \u201cWe can fix it so we know we’re going to get a block within a set period of time,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Though bitcoin can be sent via the traditional internet or satellite-based alternatives, Foundation will require super-powerful alternatives. NASA already has an array of global radio satellites, the Deep Space Network, sending enhanced signals to spacecraft on other planets. But Chou would prefer the hardware not to be controlled by a government. \u201cI am not talking about sending a confirmation on ACH or a wire transfer to Mars, because who knows who’s gonna be there?\u201d says Chou. \u201cWhat happens if the laws get changed on Earth, or they put a hold because the Fed says this or that? You don’t want the bureaucracy to slow down the progress of what the people on Mars are trying to do.\u201d<\/p>\n C<\/abbr>hou\u2019s vision for a space economy free of the bonds of Earth is far from certain. But he\u2019s not alone. On Valentine\u2019s Day in 2016 astronaut Scott Kelly bought his wife a dozen roses from space, and paid for them with a credit card. While the internet connectivity in space is horrible, the astronaut who spent 520 days in orbit, says when he mustered the patience he could even \u201cdo some banking,\u201d and once managed to buy a plane ticket home. Cash, he says, is forbidden. \u201cIf we don’t destroy ourselves, absolutely, someday, we will have the need for currency in space, whether it’s an orbiting hotel, or something on the moon or something on Mars,\u201d says Kelly. \u201cBut if we do, there will absolutely, at some point, be a place for space currency and it just makes sense that it’s crypto, because it’s not a fiat currency from any particular government.\u201d<\/p>\n Already, Canada-based Blockstream broadcasts the bitcoin blockchain to a satellite network. Singapore-based SpaceChain has launched multiple payloads into space for processing bitcoin, ethereum, and qtum transactions and is now building a decentralized satellite infrastructure, owned by multiple individuals and companies around the world. However, the most likely near-term alternative to NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network is Elon Musk\u2019s StarLink network of 2,000 satellites. The StarLink fine print<\/a> codifies Musk\u2019s vision for interplanetary communication divorced of government obligations: \u201cFor Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft,\u201d the print reads. \u201cthe parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cStacks of cash don’t do much on Mars.\u201d <\/p>\n
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