Stephen: This is Stephen Sargeant. My mind is blown. This is the Around The Coin podcast and we just had Grant Blaisdell come in and talk to us about Copernic Space and all of the technology that he's bringing out into other space. This episode blew my mind. The amount of technology, the use of blockchain. He is really showing us what the future is going to look like.

He basically said we have the real world, we have the metaverse, the only other option is to build out in space and that's exactly what they're doing by creating a marketplace for space assets and real world token asset tokenization. This is just a really great podcast. He talks about his culture. Growing up with the music background and family members in space.

We get into the hardcore blockchain technology, but he gives us some real use cases of what's happening right now in the space world, but also talking about mining in space, blockchain and Bitcoin mining and AI computation out in space. If you're a forward looking futurist person, and if you're like a marketer or building payments products and stuff, this might be the podcast you want to listen to and get some really good insights on what the next 10 years is going to look like.

Reach out to me or Grant if you love this episode and we'll talk soon.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant. We have a special, special guest, someone I've been following for it feels like almost a decade. We were both kind of in that blockchain investigation space. Grant, you are a character. Tell me a little bit about yourself and then we're going to dive down into like your history, what you've been working on and then talk about other space because that is where the future of digital assets is going to lie based on I think some of your theses.

So tell me a little bit about Grant.

Grant: Yeah, I'd appreciate it. And, and nice to, you know, finally, let's say connect and create something out of, you know, a relationship we've been building for, for almost a decade. Myself, I view myself as a creator more than anything. It's, it's always been really the central point of who I am.

So I'm not necessarily a specialist in, in anything. I'm more of a generalist. My first creations are really music. That's, that's what I come out of. I started playing instruments when I was about four years old, ended up in orchestra, you know, doing the viola, got, did guitar way before that. So I'm also kind of a generalist musically.

I'm quite, you know, multi instrumentalist around it. And that's really what led into what I do to this point. Because. I realized at a certain point that the way the music and digital media industry, what was becoming the digital media industry, right? I'm still old enough to where, you know, I was using LimeWire and the entire argument of digitizing music was, you know, revolutionary and the industry was fighting it and, you know, laughed at it at first and then try to stomp it out.

And, you know, Now in reality, tech companies run the, run the, the music industry in a lot of ways. So I was very interested

Stephen: You were in that space so early, I want to interrupt you, because that's where you kind of started your, you

know, you were in that kind of media, music, content space.

By the sounds of it, it sounds like you were building something like Napster. Were you kind of in between kind of playing in that area around the time Napster was developing?

Grant: So we'll, well, when that was coming out, I was a little too young. So I was like early high school, I was more in the bedroom rapping and using this new tech to kind of. Put things together and stuff like that. But you know, when we get into the discussion around Copernic Space and a lot of stuff I'm doing now, it will revert back to the models and the solutions that I started building over a decade ago, focused around digital media and, and music, right?

I'm, I'm blessed, you know, to have the parents I have. In the sense of, you know, I had my first startup when I was 19. I don't take credit for that. I take, I give credit to my parents, especially my mom, who's my co founder in Copernic Space now for pushing me into that. So I was blessed to be a creator.

So I create the music or whatever the asset is. Right. But my blessing is, is that I got into trying to understand, but more so build the models that will fuel those assets in the future, right? So that's really what got me into like blockchain tech over a decade ago was like looking at it as a new infrastructure and model.

For protecting, monetizing, and creating transparency around, around assets. So music, and we'll get into it later, music's still a big, big part of my life both personally and professionally, but it stood as my, my foray into creation. I even went to film school for a bit because I'm, I'm, I'm very much a visual.

Person, I see things much more visually. So, you know, understanding how I can actually put my viewpoints on sound or whatever it is to an actual vision is, is a real thing. So I just view myself as a creator. I'm not special at any particular thing. I don't find myself to be, you know, a genius in any particular thing.

I actually think my advantage is I'm just smart enough. To get it, but just dumb enough to see it from like a macro perspective and see a wider solution to it versus being a specialist and being hyper focused on a particular vertical or segment.

Stephen: I love that. I think, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs listening to this podcast, founders, when it comes to payments and crypto, and they kind of probably, you know, entered this space. Tell me what it was like, you know, because a lot of entrepreneurs are listening to this. Not a lot of us had parents that were like, yeah, you know, creating an idea or, you know, startups like or follow your passion.

It was more like, Hey, get to school, you know, especially around, I'm assuming that we're in the same age range. I'm 43, so maybe a little bit older, but tell me what it's like. You say it's a blessing. Have you seen other people grow up with a very similar upbringing of like entrepreneurship, especially from that time? Or do you think like you were like very special in the sense that nobody in that generation kind of grew up with parents like that.

Grant: Well, it's also a curse, you know, because there's nothing that really feels like an accomplishment or is satisfactory. I had those, you know, and you see that even in studies and things like that, like white collar versus blue collar work, actually blue collar workers are more satisfied in their work. I feel that because, you know, even on a daily basis, there's a tangible goal there, they can feel it, you know, their, their creation and their accomplishment.

You know, it's, it's, it's a curse in, in that sense of your, your expectations of yourself are so high. Which there's something unhealthy about that, but you know, we can't generalize it like certain people are just crazy enough to deal with that. Right. And not crack or not revert to something horrible.

I had the normal pressure as well. You know, my. My father is, my father's the tail end of the World War II generation. He had me really late. He's, you know, the first one to really go to university and, and, and all that sort of stuff. So I had that pressure as well, but I've never dealt very well. It's the same thing.

Let, let me compare it to the orchestra thing. Why I left orchestra outside of just me, not me being, being kind of an idiot in high school was it's one, it's one thing to like, when someone tells you what to play and how to play it. That doesn't fit my personality very well, right? So I, I kind of took that into life and like I said, it's, it's a struggle.

So security is a big thing with most people. Most people want to feel secure. The life I chose is not that. And my father caught that in me when I was very, very young, before I had successes or, you know, even my first startups or anything like that. He said, son, you, you seem to always kind of choose the harder road to get to a certain place.

So, it's a, it's a double sided coin with anything, you know, everything is give and take around it. You have to sacrifice a lot and you have to be extremely used to feeling uncomfortable, which most people are not comfortable feeling uncomfortable. Right. So, you know, you can interview my mother one day, she's more entertaining and, you know, kind of eccentric personality than I am.

But there's, there's just gotta be a,

Stephen: follows you on Instagram, they're going to find that hard to believe.

Grant: well, I have a unique life. I'm just, you know, I'm also kind of from a different generation where I don't put everything out there, right? For better, for worse, once again. But to your question again, it's a blessing and it's a curse, but if you're going to do this type of stuff that I'm doing and trying to accomplish, like, you gotta be a little You know, crazy there and, and believe that you can do something people don't believe is, is doable.

And, and Copernic Space represents that to the maximum, right. And, and like, you know, you, we know each other through like kind of coin from connections early. We had a similar thing at the beginning of CoinFirm when we're coming out 2015, where people are like, ah, AML analytics for crypto, you know, both sides didn't understand that and viewed it as pretty crazy, but you know, you, you just be in a few steps ahead is hard and it, and it takes, you know, that there's a cool word in Polish called Witrzymałość, it's, it's like resiliency.

Right towards it. So yeah, I appreciate the question. It's, it's sometimes I, I'm sure if I did the kind of the more traditional university route, et cetera, there would be certain benefits for me that I could apply today that I don't necessarily have the best skills around today. So like everything it's give or take.

Stephen: Tell me about the transition because you know you start off digital content, media, music And then you go into a crypto compliance solution. At the time you said you just said 2015, there was really no regulations. AML companies were just looking at building and trying to take advantage of arbitrages.

They weren't worried about compliance or anti money laundering or Catching criminals, Silk Road was, you know, alive and well. What made you think, like, oh, this is an interesting area? It didn't have anything to do with media or creativity. What made you think, like, hey, this is a business that we should be early on?

And you were extremely early.

Grant: Yeah, at that time, so I was in Poland for a few years in the 90s. My mother led Compaq. When communism fell, she brought pretty much the American computer industry to Central Europe. So I was a few years here in the 90s and then a little over 10 years ago had some family stuff here. And I'm out of the California startup ecosystem.

And, and my mother and I kind of have this, this, you know, this really strong patriotism, both towards the US, but as well as Poland. Poland needs a little bit more shine and help, especially then. So we came back with this mission to show that you can. And you can find articles in like, you know, like the Financial Times of Poland, if you want to call it that, where we had a goal to show that you can build a global leader as a startup out of Poland.

And we want to use Western capital under Western culture terms attitude to accomplish that. And I was in, you know, certain stage of that goal and mission when I got introduced to what became like the founding team of what was Coin From Then. And back to my kind of generalism and not being a specialist, et cetera, and like, just smart enough, just dumb enough, you know, is that to me, it was just logic.

Kind of a lot of what you're seeing with Copernic Space, it's just like, okay, this is the logical progression the market has to take, which is okay. Well, if this is going to be in the actual commercial market for real, and not just be something for very specific people who, you know, know how to, I mean, to this day.

It's not exactly the easiest process, right? So, what would be the step to that? What's going to be the bridge, right? Well, one of the biggest hurdles is just a regulatory thing, right? And KYC is a lot more like kind of straightforward cookie cutters, so to say versus like the AML, the source of funds, the analytics end, right?

And, you know, so credits to the Pavos, you know, who, you know, one of them. You know, they come out of that specific thing and they understood, you know, if you look at blockchain itself, it's a transparent, immutable ledger of all transactions. Okay. So the big issues, like in the finance, traditional financial space, these are all data silos.

Right? They're all verticals of data and there's no horizontal aspect to it, right? Whereas a blockchain is like that for a particular asset class under that chain, right? So if you know how to analyze that properly and push it through certain algorithms and then crawl web and deep web, Tor, all this other stuff, put it in and push through algorithms, you can actually change the reality of AML totally.

Because for me, the way, and you know, the more you get to know me and stuff, like I'm not a, I'm kind of an anti authoritarian minded guy, right? So I'm not big on regulations as in the first place, but how I justified that in my head was, well, I'm an entrepreneur, right? Most of this regulatory stuff, whether valid or not, is used as an anti competitive measure to block out. Fast, nimble, smaller competition into markets. Why? Because if you're going to do AML in the traditional way. You better have lots of labor, lots of people, lots of stuff around it, right? So that eliminates majority of the competition in the market, right? The other aspect is it's extremely inefficient.

It's ineffective. The results aren't even good. It's, it's kind of a joke. So if we could figure out to turn it almost into like an automated utility, that's much more effective and efficient and enables millions of more companies, entrepreneurs to be able to fulfill that. Awesome, right? So, I viewed it as, okay, this is the natural progression of the market and the solutions that's needed to bridge it, right?

And, you know, when we were first coming, I'd talk to the exchanges, I'd go, I know you're the smartest guy in the world, you got it all figured out, but trust me, give it a year, give it two years even, right? See what happens. A lot of those people came back to us and were like, became our clients and our customers and stuff like that.

So, CoinFirm actually stands

Stephen: I love that perspective, by the way, opening up the industry to more people, because I think early on, people were very libertarian, but it's like, you can have two options, be libertarian, not want to do the KYC or regulatory route, or you can actually build a business. And I think what you realize is like, in order for us to build a business, We're going to have to do the regulation, so we can be libertarian and stay small, or we can follow some of these regulations and build a big business, and to your point, open up the market for other entrepreneurs to come into it.

So I think that was a really great perspective, and I've never heard anyone talk about it in that way.

Grant: well, I appreciate that. And, and you know, what separated CoinFirm from all these other guys? And to this day, the product makes those guys look like they're in the Stone Age in reality, and that's for a variety of reasons. But what separated us is like, we didn't take the authoritarian approach towards it.

We took the private market approach towards it, right? So once again, yeah, the bigger the contract, the better, obviously we're a business, but how do we enable scale in the market versus keep this as a very expensive, exclusive thing for better, for worse, right? Market has tend to reward more of the authoritarian minded ones a bit more.

But. You know, one of the struggles of, of being, let's say, progressive, visionary, whatever, you know, hype term or whatever you want to use is like the market has to adjust, you know, it, it takes time to understand that that's actually the real deal. Like manual forensics and stuff, all this stuff is necessary, but that's not.

The thing right at the end of the day. So I'm extremely proud of, of what we built there. I'm proud of it individually. I think, you know, it's a London headquarter company, et cetera, but it was built by. All the founders are Polish citizens. You know, I'm a Polish citizen, you know, the team was here. So the country should be proud of that as well.

And to your question, it, you know, it's a it wasn't as much of, let's say, a culture change or shock for me because I was still in the creation point, right? So for me, once it hits like corporate management, that's where I don't fit in too well, right? But. As an entrepreneur, as a creator, you know, you can throw me into pretty much any market and I'll figure out within a couple of days what's like a solution that can be, that's, that's, that's viable.

They're partially because I'm, I'm not a specialist and I'm not that smart at it and that's my strength.

Stephen: What are your thoughts about a lot of these AI power, blockchain analytics companies

are coming up, you know, you're like, Hey, you guys don't even know what you're getting into. If someone's listening to this and they're in email, they may not be the coin firms or the chain analysis of the world, but they're maybe doing some kind of risk management or intelligence.

Would you have any advice for them as they get into this space.

Grant: Yeah, no, when, when I said it's, when I said it's BS, I was just commenting kind of to the AI thing. Like I had a chance, you know, cause as chief marketing officer, I built a lot of, you know, the company name, the branding, the communication is like, we had a certain choice at some point to say, okay, are we using AI?

Right. And this is before the AI, you know, super big boom last year and the year before. But either way, no matter what, if you add that to it, it adds a little flavor. But out of, you know, honor or, you know, being legitimate, I'd show, you know, we did really advanced, we do really advanced machine learning.

I can't comment on what it's doing now. I'm sure there's some AI elements to it, but why I'm bringing this up is because you would have companies going AI this, AI that. Most of these companies are not using AI. They're using, at best, some advanced machine learning, or it's just a plugin into some other AI solution, right?

So, there's some, there's some cool. Cool different takes on it. Just remember like, you know, with, with, with blockchain, it's, yeah, it's the most traceable assets ever, except for Monero. But like once it hits certain applications, it's a lot harder to see those insights. So there are challenges in it that are a little bit different than the normal web 2 things.

And there's different companies that are taking different approaches towards it that aren't, you know, like compliance or AML focused. Right. But like in Poland, there's a company called Cookie3, for example, that focuses more on the marketing element by analyzing your blockchain activity and holdings. So it's like, what do I sell you and how do I sell it to you?

Right. So, and, and I think that's, you know, that's the market maturing once again, and the, the tech maturing along with it. So when I said BS, I, I mean that more of like startups, they run around and yell AI, like the probability of them actually doing AI is quite quite low. So, you know, once again, for better, for worse, you choose to use certain terms to communicate certain things, like with, with Copernic Space, the amazing opportunity we have and our users have, you know, which we involve in a lot of what we do is, Hey, we're really building the language, the terms for a market, right?

Like space asset has existed, but really what is that, right? So what are all these terms? And everything's a communication education curve around this stuff. So like smart people, you know, like VCs who don't just aren't strictly hype based will like understand, okay, you're just using AI as like a term.

Cool. Use it. But you know, deep down, what is it really?

Stephen: Yeah, you can usually, you ask two questions and you know whether they're using it or they've, or whether they just heard it in a headline. Let's get to compare and expase, like it's 2020, the NFT market's still a little, like

just emerging, and you decide to build something Not even an NFT marketplace like here.

You're like, Hey, how can we think about the next evolution of an NFT marketplace? Give us a summary. Cause like your family, you know, you have a lot, you talked about your mother, your family has a lot of connections to space. So maybe start by laying the foundation of, you know, what is space exploration and your family, how are they connected?

And then we'll get into you explaining what Compare

Grant: Yeah. So, my father's father was more like me, an entrepreneur, but he was a jazz percussionist. He has his own jazz bands. My, my mother's father Dr. Tadeusz Gajewski Helped build and create the original Polish national space and astronaut program. So he was very high up in the air force. Here capitalistic, progressive minded guy stuck in his geopolitical realities and limitations.

So he has the earliest works I know of also around the concept of like, what is democratizing space? You know, not as a marketing term, but like, what is that really for him? His, his students, the people he works with. I'm not a space like science exploration guy. It comes back to that kind of macro economic solution viewpoint.

You know, kind of what I was talking about with CoinFirm as well. It's like, okay, how do we break this down and turn this into something that as many people can have access, benefit to, et cetera. So those are really like the history, the values the roots that, that sit behind this, this company. So I'm not your traditional space guy at all whatsoever, but I have a deep understanding and care for.

The space market, the people that are in it and the benefits it provides, which, you know, space has similar struggles to crypto. It's even worse at it though, which is it's not very good at communicating the value it creates and like pound for pound return on investment. Nothing has created more value in the past 60 years than space.

People just don't see it. It's not communicated to them. What we're using right now, all this stuff here is originally developed for space. I'll get into you, ask the AI thing. I'll tell you why the future of AI is in space, for example, right? So at the end of the day, it is. Already really one of the most important markets that's ever existed in mankind's history, but it's from a private aspect, it's pretty brand new, right?

And it's going to turn into the most important market and asset class in human history. The, the big challenge and the opportunity, we think the largest opportunity maybe of this century is, okay, what is the commercial and financial infrastructure and the market? the models that this space economy is going to be built on.

And that's the big opportunity for blockchain tech, because it's a market that hasn't had that infrastructure placed yet. And blockchain really is an economic infrastructure tech at the end of the day. So if you really want it to be expansive and really serve its big purpose, it's got to be in there at the core.

And that's, you know, through my history at CoinFirm and playing around in different markets, that's the big challenge that you see. It's like. You can't get through the decades of legacy systems, all this sort of stuff that is existing in all these other markets. And there's this massive opportunity in space that will provide the most tangible return, whether economic or like.

Utility, like tangible solutions for for life on earth. So for me, this is my family legacy...

Stephen: Let interrupt believe. Do you believe who ever gets there and kind of creates the infrastructure first will then get to determine, you know, or will get to reap the biggest monetization? Because is that why there's almost like a race to spaces? Like whoever can set up the infrastructure will be able to tell like, hey, this is the monetary we're using.

This is like.. All these moonstones. These are ours. This is how much we charge for them. Like, is that your thought process?

Grant: it's, it's 1492. You know what I mean by that?

Stephen: No. Ha ha ha, I was it's, the discovery of the new world. Okay, so what's happening here? There's new rules set up, there's geopolitical players are coming in, private people are coming in there's no real standards set, right? It is literally the discovery of the new world and it's the revolution it's going to create is, you know, equal if not more.

Grant: So to your point, yes, what's needed though is that marketplace, that market for it. Just as an example, I've Wasn't expecting this question for years, but I had a major international space company, Does Moon Missions, ask me, can they use our platform, for example, to tokenize regolith they're going to collect on the moon, so natural resources they're going to collect on the moon, you know, verify it, tokenize it as what we call real world space assets and transfer that ownership to a nation state. Right? So like, these are things that are all already in consideration, right? Around that for us, there's all, it's already a 500 billion market. You got, you know, thousands of people, entrepreneurs, companies creating stuff on one end, what we call space assets of various kinds. And then you got millions of individuals.

Companies, investors, organizations that are trying to access this market. Right. But once again, no one's created the actual market for a market that's already 500 billion. It's really a very unique moment in time in history. It's like touching crypto in 2011 and you know it. Right. So, it's, it's like I said...

Stephen: how would it work? Why can't you build this, like, why does, is the marketplace, maybe give me an understanding, is the marketplace in space? Is the marketplace referencing real world assets here on earth as well as like the value of space assets and gives you, Hey, like, Hey, you're not in space, but you can get a, just like, Hey, you're not on the blockchain, but you might be able to buy a piece of the, you know, you can buy a Bitcoin.

That is a representation of that world. And to your point, it's like, people are trying to get in there early. Hey, if I can get assets now, if I can get Bitcoin when it's 10 cents, and I really believe in the long term value of these assets. I can get that now and hold on to it. Is that what you're, the marketplace you're trying to create is for people before we even develop whatever's going to happen in the other space?

Grant: Well, no, I would, the market's already there, right? That no one has built the marketplace for it. Think about like, you know, what was retail fashion before e commerce? What were, how could you even project what the revenue and how that market was going to look? And that within, you know, 15 years, the richest guy on earth was a fashion retailer. Right. No one, no one would have foresaw that. So the way that we, we separate what we're building is really a platform that serves as a standard for tokenizing, commercializing, or financing certain space assets. So we segregate space assets into two kinds, right? What we call real world space assets. So these are tangible assets of ownership and utility payload space in a SpaceX rocket, the payload that is being put into the rocket.

Right? How do you own that? Satellite imagery, the billions of dollars in intellectual property that has no place to be discovered, et cetera. Right? We call those real world space assets. Then we have financial space assets. So that's us applying tokenization to create new models on how to Finance and provide assets to liquidity providers and investors.

The VC market doesn't work for space. Governments aren't going to fund it all. They don't fund a lot of things on different parameters. So crypto will actually stand as this economic infrastructure for how the space economy operates, and I'll give you some, some use cases. Right? When we launched in 2020, you know, I'm, one of my strengths is building the brand, communicating the vision, et cetera.

We started having space companies come to us. We initially wanted to focus on like digital space assets, like satellite imagery, things that are more scalable and the financial stuff. How do we fund these guys, right? And provide financiers an asset that is liquid, has a secondary market, et cetera. But space companies started coming to us.

And they said, we believe what you're doing is the future of how this market needs to look. A lot of them were, what, moon mission focused companies. So what did we do? We said, let's build a standard for this certain asset type, which is what? Initially physical payload. How do I verify and tokenize the space, the capacity?

I have a hundred kilos on this moon mission. And then how do we create the business process on the platform for people to discover this opportunity? Submit what they want to put there, go through that process. Verify it and then create a whole new asset that represents what they're putting in that has provenance.

It's tied to the original one. You can verify it that it's actually there. What does that mean now? That means that not only can I easily discover how to send something somewhere, but I have a way to verify and create ownership of that asset. And create an own economic lifeline or utility for that particular asset.

So like with our moon mission this year, what did we do? Instead of doing what we normally do and onboard other companies, tokenize their assets, list it and offer it to the market. We said, you know what, we'll do it ourselves. We started working on a standard called digital payloads. Okay. We foresaw that digital capacity in space and computation in space is going to be even more scalable than physical.

So we started working with space companies on that. So we decided, okay, let's do it ourselves. I went, invested money, bought digital payload. So digital capacity on a moon mission. What do we do? We tokenize that space, offered it to the commercial market, onboarded around 2000 different commercial assets to be sent. To the moon at the end of this year, tokenized into real world space assets that can then be listed on our marketplace. So at the end of the year, you'll be able to buy and trade ownership of assets that are literally on the lunar surface, right? And this serves as a foundation..

Stephen: that, is that someone like me that's like, I love space, I would love to have a piece of space, but the chances of me getting to space right now is next to impossible, I have to spend millions of dollars, but I can buy a small tokenized version of something that's gone to the moon, and I will always own that, that will be mine, is that kind of the concept?

Grant: Yeah. And, and just view it as a system. It doesn't matter whether it's a Rover, it's a Nike shoe, or it's. It's my music, which I'm sending up or it's artwork, whatever it is. You have to create the standards and the market for it. So the market can act and grow the way that it needs to act and, and grow. So for us, it's, we love playing around and innovating around what these assets are.

Bring brands, watches, all these different sorts of things are very innovative and revolutionary around that. But for me, the bigger picture is what is the system in the marketplace to facilitate it. You know, all of this sort of stuff. So that's like an example of a, you know, a real world space asset. So, whether it's a SpaceX rocket or..

Stephen: My brain going crazy right now. I have to ask you about land, right? Now it's like, when I think about what you're doing, I think a lot about the metaverse, right? People, you know, Snoop Dogg bought a plot of land, people are spending millions of dollars to buy the plot of land

virtual land or spatial land, right beside Snoop Dogg.

Grant: Yeah, we want to digital twin that in Metaverse as we have partners around that so like you go into a lunar experience and you can buy and trade literal things that are on the moon, right? So how do we, how do we

Stephen: How about land on the moon or on another planet? Are we far away from that?Are we?

Grant: No, we're closer than you think. So remember the question that that company, that I told you that company asked me, right? Okay, so those are the first iterations you're going to see of that. We have another partner called Lunar Resources Registry who's on our moon mission as well. What they're doing is they're kind of mapping and building the foundation of what are mining rights and space. See, so for these people who are like, I'm selling you a star or I'm selling you a plot, those are scams. They have, they don't have the rights of ownership or no rights exist for them to offer that to you. That's why we're not selling moon plots. I don't have the rights or no one has the rights to sell that, but you do have the rights to sell something you own that's on the moon. Okay. So what is happening though, back to the new world sort of comparison, China landed on the dark side of the moon the other week, grabbed some stuff and they brought it back. Okay. China does not care what the UN thinks, because these are UN mainly setting these things, right? China does not care what the UN thinks.

So once again, my comparison of the new world is like, yeah, there's some sort of standards there, but what I like to say around people's utopian visions of like governance is you and what army, right? So, it's, it's fascinating. The future of geopolitics, we can't call it geopolitics really anymore, but the future of geopolitics is in space.

The future of the most advanced technologies as it has been in the past 60 years will continue, you know, especially will continue being in space. And I can unwrap that for you in a million different ways, but how do I Trade ownership of some natural resource created in space. How do I finance the space mission that is going in, going to collect that stuff?

How does that company finance itself? And what does it reward liquidity providers? These standards models all need to be. Implemented just like it had to do for e commerce, you know, eBay still around, Amazon is still around. These kind of standards that they built are still around, right? And space just is one of the few markets left that hasn't entered the digital economy whatsoever.

And it's doing so at such a late time that blockchain can be put in, in its core infrastructure and create a new level of ownership, trust, security, utility that space needs, right? The space needs.

Stephen: If I put on my marketing hat and I'm like, hey Grant, or you put on your marketing hat and say, hey guys, I'm going to the moon. It's costing 15 million, 100 million dollars. But I will take a portion of the space that I'm bringing with me and you guys can all support and pretty much Crowdfund my trip to the moon and I'm gonna bring a part of your brand, your company, your flag Is that something that could is that the pro are you the like, pick and ax that are gonna be like, Hey, we can't do that now.

We can't just give Elon Musk 15 million to jump in his capsule and bring you know, or like, hey, shout out our company name when he gets on the moon. Could you build that based on what your platform does? that's what we've, we've proven last year and proving it this year with our own moon mission. The market is still a little immature to where we have to be more hands on with it. Also why we kind of did the moon mission on our own is because it's like, you know, these are genius guys solving, doing and solving genius things.

Grant: Is the, the, the space market is not yet a marketing sales. To the external market thinking thing, you know, it's going to take something like us and some other things that are happening to push it firmly into that direction. They know it's coming, right? All this stuff is coming. It's got to happen. It's going to happen.

The question is who and how and when. Right? So to your model, that's exactly, you know, what we're doing. So here's the thing, back to the democratization element. It's like, here's the thing. You can go to SpaceX right now and give them 15 million to send some stuff up. Not an issue. Okay. But what can you do with it?

Right? And that's the other Holy Grail. It's, it's, we think there's billions of dollars, obviously, in just discovery and transactionability, saying, hey, here's the space market, discover it, you know, transact here. But the big thing is, is, okay, how do I have ownership and an asset out of what I'm doing in space?

So it's one thing to send something to space. It's another thing to have verified ownership of what you send in space that you can do something with further. And that's like the operating, the economic operating system. That's the Holy grail that sits behind all of this. And it's really, to be honest, man, that is the calling of. Blockchain of, of crypto is that it's like, it's a tech to build new markets and new models for markets and, and assets. So when you're talking about 2020 NFTs, NFTs weren't a thing then really like, yeah, they were, but. Remember, I start off,

Stephen: Not to the average consumer. Nobody's like, hey, I'm gonna buy an NFT instead of a Michael Jordan rookie card.

Grant: No, it's like super nerd stuff, okay, like, it's super nerd stuff, and, you know, remember, I come out of this out of the music industry, so, you know, these are models that I was building around this tech before the tech matured to that point, right? So, we use NFTs, and this is very important, because NFTs create an image in people's heads.

They have an idea of what it is. So we utilize NFTs as a vehicle with features, functions, benefits, rights for an asset, in this case, a real world space asset. NFT is not the sales point itself. And over time, we want to totally get away from that terminology because it's just like, okay, what's the tech that's powering whatever I'm doing here?

I don't care. So, you know, the next 10 years for the whole market overall is going to be like, how do we remove that friction of the Web3 thing? And that's something we're focused as a platform over the next year is like, how do we eliminate as much Web3 friction in the product as possible? But Yeah, it's, it's a serious thing.

It sounds, it sounds a little out there at first, but when you take a step back and you look at it, you go, Oh, this might be the most legitimate thing in blockchain right now, versus just, I'm creating a made up asset and moving it around.

Stephen: Like, when I'm looking at what you're doing, like, how early are you? Like, if I had to, are you like 2011? Are you like, hey, like, are you 2009? Because I think the biggest concern a lot of entrepreneurs listening to this is you never want to be too early. You never want to be first because there's a chance that you might not have enough funding to kind of see the realization. And then another bigger company like Microsoft or Google app are like, Hey, like Grant laid all the foundation. We know exactly what to do now. Grant, we'll

Grant: Yeah. We're experience

Stephen: Grant's out of the business because he can afford to stay above ground. And now we'll take over from here. Is there any worry or challenges when you are building something so massive?

Grant: Great. No, great. Great question. Great question. Amazon out of, out of all those companies, Amazon is the most likely one, just an FYI. That's kind of how I see it because they get space, they get marketplaces, they secretly get NFTs in the background. We've already experienced that. Timing is extremely important.

I viewed it this way. I saw the collision happening, and after this, you're going to do a little bit more research, and you'll see that there's a lot of crypto meets space things that are popping up, and I can show them to you as well. But the way I looked at it, and take a look back at the eBay, the Amazon example, etc.

Being a marketplace first mover advantage is super important. We were...

Stephen: OpenSea was a good example of that.

Grant: excuse me, what'd you say?

Stephen: I was saying OpenSea is a really great example of that. I was talking about NFTs, right? They were just kind of there floundering. And then when it hits, it really hits.

Grant: Right. So, you know, there's, there's that curve, you know, there's that education, communication curve, et cetera. So I would say we were a little early around some things. And if I wasn't like, If I didn't have that kind of insane perseverance, you know, know how to bootstrap, be a real startup entrepreneur sort of thing, would be dead.

Okay. As most companies that went through 2022, 2023, you know, who were betting on some big things, you know, died. So I've experienced that. It's, you know, it fluctuates. We generate revenue, right? So we're a revenue generating company. But is it at the levels to pay? Put as much fuel in the rocket as we need, of course not, right?

So we have to play the fundraising game. But I also think, remember that the companies that really create transformative change, build new markets or new standards, they never have it easy in the beginning. Give me any example. Practically, those guys had to be told that they're crazy for a couple years and no one believed in them.

They had to fund it. Musk had to fund SpaceX himself. Bezos couldn't get funded. The Google guys were laughed at. So it's, it's a part of the process and it's, it's painful. And sometimes you have to sacrifice incredible amounts of your comfort. And to push through it. So, you know, we've pushed through the worst parts and we came out, you know, the other end stronger than ever.

And now we're pushing into that moon mission Q4, we're going to, you know, raise our second round, formal round or seed round to go along with it. So I, I think it's a curve as long as we continue doing what we're doing. And you know, we survived that. I don't view it as surviving. I view it as, you know, thriving through that.

I know what we're doing once again, has to happen, will happen. Right. And we have that leadership position. And now people are, to be honest, kind of taking bits and pieces, trying to copy, do things here and there. And, you know, people that I spoke to years ago, right. So, you know, which I take as, as flattery.

I take it as, as, as an honor. So I'm extremely confident about what we're doing, but it's, it's not an easy road and, and to be honest, not enough. Of that is said, like everyone wants to be a startup entrepreneur, pump that, but no one tells them actually what the reality is. Right.

Stephen: To, it's hard to put in words, I think. Talk to me a little bit about that. Cause you're saying, you know, like in our, now when you see things like Elon or someone else going to space, does that help kind of, does that kind of help push, you know, promote a conversation with people? Investors, cause like 10 years ago, it's like, Hey, nobody's going to the moon, but NASA or countries now you're like, Hey, if you have enough money, you can get to the moon.

Like, has, has, has that progressed kind of your thesis now that you're seeing individual people that are well known in the industry, figuring out ways to To make it affordable, almost. I don't want to use that

term too much, but like, before you had to be powered by a nation. Now it's like, hey, you just have to be powered by a very rich person.

Grant: Well, it's like, Stephen, to be honest, like early next year, you know, you want to have access to a satellite. I can get that for you. So, let me just, it's, it's a point I brought up, I was bringing up and I didn't get to finish on your previous question, then I'll get into what you said, this democratization thing is important.

So once again, like to the SpaceX thing, you can give them the 15 million. What we're doing is we're enabling to take these big and heavy assets and be able to bust them down into more consumable units for the wider commercial market. Right. So, you know, when we were looking at doing, you know, this stuff, even years ago, it was like, okay, you pretty much had a million, you had to have a million dollars to even have that discussion.

Right. How do we break that down into a thousand? How do we break that down into a hundred? On our moon mission, we did loads of stuff charitable. There's people that are going up for free. You know, we have our own Lady Rocket Foundation, so we got kids doing, you know, artwork around the world in our programs, that stuff's going up, you know, so there's different ways to approach it. To your point, yeah, most definitely. Like what Musk has done is, is, I actually think SpaceX is the most important thing he's ever done and will be. No matter what. Okay. People just don't understand it. They don't see it yet, but it definitely helps the more one thing we realized one reason, like one of the many reasons, like we have our own like native NFT on the platform, our space passports is we realized that like people's connection with space and belief in iand engagement with it won't happen until they have something they own or some connection they have with it, right? And the, that Holy Grail, that bridge, you know, once again is, you know, millions to go up in space and Starlink is groundbreaking by the way. Right. But that's a couple of guys that are doing that. Right? So how do we create the models and the opportunities and, you know, the structure so that Millions of people actually have that tangible access ownership entry point.

Right. So I'm not, I don't like the term disrupt a lot. I think, you know, Silicon Valley kind of hyped that up. Although I do view us as disruptive in some way, we were there to be constructive for the space economy. So how do we empower, you know, Musk doesn't need it, but the 99. 9 percent of the other guys in the space economy need it badly.

Okay. Whether it's the financing models. Let me give you an example. Awesome company European, moving to the States, doesn't matter, but they have, this is a real situation in the space economy, they have millions of dollars in contracted revenue, government, private, you do this, you get this. But they lack the short term liquidity to be able to fulfill that contract, okay?

So, what are they supposed to do? Go to a bank? Banks don't know how to treat this. If it was a baker, they'll be like, Oh, here's a loan. It's a nice interest rate. Do, do, do, do, do space company. They don't know how to treat it. It's, it's not going to happen at least anytime soon. The governments are paying out the contracts.

They don't invest, right? So they're not going to provide you that liquidity. That's not a model that works for VCs, even if the VC absolutely loves the company or loves space. It's not a model. Who's that a model

Stephen: Too long term, you think?

Grant: No, it's just, it doesn't fit their mandate because what is the model? Right. I'll, I call it space staking. What's the model in this case? So I'm taking contracted

Stephen: I like that word, by the way. Spacestake. Spacestake is a good one. I like that one.

Grant: Well, it's the thing, the staking is like people are depositing their funds to be played with by other people. How about you deposit your funds to create actual tangible value and push something forward? Right. So for us, it goes, okay, so I take those contracts.

I put, I say, all right, I need 500K liquidity to fulfill 7 million in contracts. I'm willing to Get that liquidity at a 15% interest rate over one year, paid out in three tranches over that year. Okay, so you verify that and make sure it's legit. You list that on the marketplace, on ComparingSpace.

Open it up to thousands or millions of people and that problem is solved in a second. They get back tokens that represent their rights to, based off the liquidity they provided. Right? And now you just created a model that solves that problem in space to where, you know, crypto can actually fund and create tangible value in a real market with real entrepreneurs doing real stuff backed by real things. Right. And that's just one of those kinds financial..

Stephen: I love that example. It makes it very clear, but it also puts my compliance hat on and says, well, what's the regulatory considerations for that.

Grant: Sure. Sure. And that's the..

Stephen: done in space, but that sounds like a security

Grant: it is, it is, it is. That's why I segregate, that's why I segregate real world space assets from financial space assets. Most of these financial space assets, unless they're. Like philanthropic, or it's like, Hey, you know, help fund us. You'll get this NFT that gives you some cool things. They're all going to be securities for the most part. So that's a security, right? That's why we're, we didn't do this stuff first. Cause we're like, Oh shit. Well, the timeline is going to be three years to get through this. So what we're doing now is we're partnering with SEC regulated guys to where we're the funnel and they're actually the, the offering.

Right? So we're kind of jumping over that until we have our own licensing. But this is just an example of the massive opportunity that exists in the space economy that hasn't been solved yet. And people look at it as immature. Yeah, it's an immature market, but it's a 500 billion immature market.

Stephen: Awesome. I love it. Is there anything I want to get into some rapid questions your thoughts? You've been in this space for so long. There's a lot going on recently, but is there anything else that you want to leave making sure that we know comparing the space? So what we, and we'll get to at the end of the conversation about what we can look forward to in the coming years, probably something around the space missions, but is

there anything else? If someone's listening to this and saying, Oh, this is really interesting. What's one thing that you want them to take away from it?

Grant: Oh, God. Such a, such a big question. Well, listen I'll kind of give you where we're going here in a sec. The, the way I view it is, is, is this, like, just like I was telling, I was telling you, you know, the future of AI is in space, et cetera. Creating a democratized and as transparent, decentralized of a space market. That is possible, that empowers as many people to have that tangible access and ownership to it is. The most important, not just opportunity, but once again, for tangible benefits on life on earth.

For example, if we're able to push, you know, the accessibility to satellite imagery and deliver it in a more accessible, usable way. No matter what your passion is, you like animals. We got initiatives to protect animals utilizing satellite imagery. You're a climate change person. Okay. How do we better monitor this and create real solutions for it?

If you're, if you're into, you know, natural resources, all right. You know, let's stop doing horrible digging and mining in, you know, on earth and let's figure out and fuel the entrepreneurs, you know, to go and solve that in space, right? Most of the solutions we're looking for long term exist in. It's not just a market for billionaires so they can show off or so that they can run from earth when things really get bad, which is kind of the perspective that people have. It's a thing for billionaires and nation states.

Stephen: I think you exactly summed it up perfectly.

Grant: Right? Well, I don't like that viewpoint on it. It's like my mother has a saying. She goes, you know, let's be better on earth. Before we land on Mars, the point is, is how do we create a marketplace and a model that uses space to create better results in life on earth?

And if space communicates itself that way a little bit more more towards people's passions and what's important to them then it will be successful. But the, that economic infrastructure, that marketplace needs to be created for it. And. Now is an amazing time and opportunity because it's, it's early enough to where you can plant your flag and become a, a real part of this.

The space market needs every kind of person. It needs less engineers. It needs more people like, like you and I. But it's big and real enough to where, you know, you can build a viable business. And yeah, people might look at you a little crazy when you say, yeah, I have a space company or do something in space.

But you But it's up to, you know, us early people to once again, curve that kind of education, communication bend that we're on right now. So Space is Real it's going to be funded by you. Whoever's watching, you're going to be the funder. It's not going to be the big VC guy until later on. It's not going to be the government.

There's not enough money in the governments to do it. It's going to be like the crypto space. It was funded by you guys.

Stephen: I love that perspective and I think it's going to give a lot of people to think about, especially people trying to build businesses and figure out, you know, what's coming now versus like what's already happened, especially in the crypto market...

Grant: Can I Can I make a quick comment I you know, make a quick comment on that? Just real quick, just as an example, one of our most recent like clients is a industrial, like they 3d print your roads and they're linking up with us. Cause they want to explore how to 3d print infrastructure on the moon, which is contracts NASA is going to be given out soon.

Stephen: I love that. That's probably got a lot of people thinking. But you're doing stuff right now in the NFT marketplace, and you're combining your music and technology. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing with the festivals you're putting on and how you're using the NFT technology and blockchain technology to kind of, you know, incorporate it in something that we're traditionally aware of, raves, festivals, music, like how are you incorporating the technology

Grant: first off, we're even doing it with Copernic Space. So before I get into that, so like culture arts is the space and music and arts are like the most innate human thing, right? Like that everybody can kind of agree on or be a part of. So actually the first marketplace were released on our platforms called Spaceables.

The platform's down right now. We're preparing for the moon mission, but this has hundreds and hundreds of artists, creators all over the world. It's not going to be our main revenue driver, but it is the marketplace for the culture of space. So the music, the art, et cetera. Why? It's like our Trojan horse.

How do we emotionally engage and onboard the wider market and then move them across into like the more serious space asset opportunity. So no matter what we're doing my, when I say we, my mother and I arts and culture have a big element of that. We got multimillion dollar art collections going up on our moon mission.

To what you're asking about, I chose to kind of move away from the music and entertainment industry. A little under a decade ago, mainly because it's a frustrating industry to work in. If you like being on time and delivering things, but space, I mean, music, the entertainment industry. And you saw that with Napster's and that, like for being very progressive and creative, they're actually not that progressive around like new tech, disruptive things like that.

Right. So, I realized at a certain point, I'm like, Okay. I'm not going to move this market as fast as I want to move. Right. So that's why I started going in and playing around in other stuff, but it's always been there and when the timing became right, you know, I, I put it together. So, the story with this is I met one day Suavec.

He runs Big Idea. He created Big Idea, which is really the first. Music company in Central Europe that focused on bringing American rappers into Central Europe. I'm, I'm a hip hop artist myself. Rap is like my main, my main, let's say, genre. And I remember I was backstage with him at this VIP thing and I started telling him Something that now has become Tixi, which is, Hey, listen, you're doing all this cool stuff.

I'm, you know, in the crypto market. I got into it because of applications for music. You're doing your own concerts, events, bare minimum. You should have your own ticketing app and attach it to, you know, NFTs to tokens, because then you can control fraud and the secondary market, which is a 30 billion industry problem.

Right. So that's like how the relationship started. Eventually I became, you know, shareholder partner in all this stuff. And it's grown to where, you know, we do the biggest artists in the world have, you know, the biggest festival now in, in Warsaw. We had it the other week, 25, 000 people each day across a few days and powering behind it is now a native ticketing app that we're, you know, let's say testing through our own.

Did 2 million in volume and it's like first month and a half. And now we're attaching the NFTs part to it. So, and very soon you'll have a secondary, like an official secondary market where you control fraud and secondary transactions and totally revolutionize how ticketing is. Music's kind of a dumb industry in a way, in the sense of like.

You see opportunities and you're like, why isn't anybody doing this? So, super positive around..

Stephen: And by with, when you have the NFTs, I'm assuming some of these artists, when they're coming out with new songs that they might be like, Hey, I want to just do an NFT to my loyal fans. Like, let me send the airdrop to maybe some of the, the people that actually came to an event where I was singing at, or, you know, rapping at, and now you've actually built that community on Web3 with very little, you know, work on your side, I'm assuming as an artist.

Grant: Yeah. So we're going to be integrating those sort of experiences into the tickets themselves or for the artists. You know, I tend to, I'm a little bit more kind of like industrial in the sense of like, I'm like, oh, yeah. Well, there's a 30 billion problem here, which is, you know, the fraud and the secondary market, scalpers, all this sort of stuff, right?

Where I think it's more important for an artist that, you know, he's not missing out on thousands or whatever in revenue that's being generated in the secondary market more so than also like a lot of artists management, like, you know, because of what happened with NFTs in the beginning, they're very. Skeptical around it. For example I was backstage with management, one of my opinion, the best rapper of all time. His original album was in 1994. I'm not going to name who it was or whatever, but. To this day, he's still releasing, pound for pound, some of the best hip hop albums and He, they were signing some vinyls for us.

And I was like, yeah, we're gonna, we're going to match an NFT with them. And they were like, no, you're not going to do any such damn thing. And no, like, so, it's that curve once again, just like, you know. When you're talking to space people about NFTs, you have to go through a certain process. We're like, listen, it's a technology I use as a vehicle and dooba dubba dooboo, right?

So, I think next year you'll start seeing the first iterations of us playing around with how to integrate different things. We already have like memberships for our, some of our festivals. So we're, we're going to be doing that over time. Listen, it's, it's already a successful, you know, startup. It's generating consistent revenue.

We got concerts every week and, you know, now it's going into its pre seed round, so to say, but it's generating good revenue to where it might not even need to do it.

Stephen: Has the removal of royalties from some of these big marketplaces had an impact on people seeing the value of NFT technology, in your opinion?

Grant: Question to you then, why, why do you think they did that?

Stephen: To be quite honest, I didn't really look under the hood. There was a couple things around, like, I think, operationally, it was really tough for the marketplaces. What are your thoughts? Because I feel like they're, they're making money regardless of whether people are trading the NFTs or not. So that makes sense why the royalties, but it probably comes back to, you know, value, right?

They want to, they want to, they want to keep all the value for themselves. And it comes back to creators losing out on that value.

Grant: Yeah, I, I, I don't agree with it actually us at Copernic Space, we're looking into second layer royalties. So, it's how do you put royalties on top of royalties. So, for example, like with the payload with the payload, it's like, okay I created the payload space. I want 2 percent of any sales related towards any assets created off my payload.

Right? So when that new asset is created, there's a 2 percent there already input. And that entity then says, I want 2 percent of any secondary sales of my asset. So then they list it and you got four segregated into twos. Moving out. And that's the future of this. Anybody who thinks that it's like, when we're talking about music royalties, which is once again, why I got into this stuff, it goes, if you ask a Spotify executive, like, how do I know that what you say I'm supposed to earn at the end of the month is the actual thing, they get kind of red face and they started going, well, distro kid and third party providers and saying, no, no, right.

So, no, the, the future is in, in the other direction. I don't understand why they did that unless there was something regulatory or I don't know. But no, that's, that's not the direction we need to go in, but it also can't end up that people are buying and trading things and they're losing 35 percent off 10 different people.

But in a lot of industries, it is like that in music. It is like that, right? So I think once again, like to the Copernicus space thing, it's like, whatever the asset is, it's like, cool, that's a cool part. And let's be innovative around that and figure out how to, you know, commercialize it. Bye. You got to build a system for people to utilize.

It's a tool for people to utilize. So give them the options to utilize it the best way possible. Just like we are blockchain agnostic technically. Yeah, we're on Polygon now, but we want to give our users the capability to create assets on different types of chains, how they see fit and try to bridge these things as best as possible.

At the end of the day, it's about the users. It's not about what the hell you want.

Stephen: Last question, what are your thoughts about You know, people's, I want to say perception about space, interest in space. You know, like when we were growing up, like people wanted to be astronauts. We've seen that recently, like the newer generation, they're looking more into TikTok and influencers maybe sports a little bit, even less.

What are your thoughts from, you know, when we were growing up, when, you know, people are drawing. You know, Neil Armstrong was a huge person in our ecosystem to now where we've seen some kind of influxes when the Canadian went to space. What are your thoughts about people's overall interest in space, and is that why you're at least letting them touch things like NFTs with visuals on it before you kind of bring them on to the outer space element of what you're doing.

Grant: Well, you know, one reason we have the Lady Rocket Foundation is, is that it's like, you know, get them young sort of, sort of thing around that. And once again to the communication education thing You don't have to be a billionaire and you don't have to be a scientist. You don't have to be an astronaut, right?

You can be the biggest, you like space, you like Tik Tok you know, there's these Tik Tok space guys that have agents, you know, like big management companies, right? That I talked to, right? So, it's, it's an industry, it's a market, you know, it's, it's, it needs its influencers as well. It needs its marketers.

It needs its fashion, you know, we mix a lot of fashion space, fashion stuff with what we do. So it's weirdly, it's about making space more human is what I would say. And creating new heroes out of it. It's like the Doge community got really behind us recently, right? Why? Because we're making to the moon literal for them, right? So, now you have a whole group of people that are going, Oh shit, space is like a real thing, right? So, one thing crypto has taught..

Stephen: It's not just a funny saying that you put on your Twitter

Grant: Right, right, right. And it's like, yeah, and I can prove it.

I have ownership, right? Like, um, God, you said something earlier that, that related towards this, but you know, we need some new heroes, you know, the heroes are, are dying, so to say, or in their, their later stages, Musk is obviously one of those. But Musk isn't very approachable. He's not like an approachable hero.

You know what I mean? So I think, I think I think there's about a five year curve, so to say, and the costs of these flights need to go down, you need more of these kind of like next year we're going to send a, we're planning on sending a rocket up and then down with like loads of physical things in it. And then, you know, you have a market for, so you sell people in to send and bring their stuff down. And then if they want, they can have a secondary market, you know, for all their stuff. It's like, what would a guy pay for a wine that's up in space? Well, someone did that the other year and the person paid six figures for it.

So, we need to create a market. Nothing is real until there's a market. It's just like, what was a space asset until you actually have a market where you can access them? It's just a concept until that point. So those are really good questions, man.

Stephen: Similar to Bitcoin, right? And before Bitcoin had marketplaces like Mt. Gox, it really wasn't functional for the wide majority of people.

Grant: Exactly. It was, here's the thing you can participate in space today, go for it. Right. But you gotta know who to call, who to talk to all this sort of, it's dude, the negotiations I had to do over the past few years to even pull off these concepts, you know, and, and, and how much, Time, I wouldn't say was wasted, but like, you know, you go and you run into a corner, you know, shit, I got to turn back around and find the door again.

Right. To, to accomplish what you want. So space is extremely challenging, but that's why there's a big opportunity. How do we make something that's big and challenging into something that's even bigger and simpler?

Stephen: I love it. Grant, where can people get in touch with you? There's probably a lot of people really excited about this podcast. Where's the best place to reach out to you? Where do you respond the most?

Grant: Yeah. Listen Best places through our Twitter @CopernicSpace. So it's C O P E R N I C. Cool story behind that. It's short for Copernicus in Polish. He was Polish. It's not Copernicus. It's just Kopernik. So we like anglophiled and put C's on it. So that's, that's the story behind that. So. @CopernicSpace, if you want to reach out to me individually, just look up Grant Blaisdell.

Google me. I don't want to sound like that. Just Google me. You can find me. Uh, Reach out to me directly. One thing I was going to say Web3 or crypto has changed in business that is not going to disappear no matter what you think about the tech or coins or whatever it is, is the idea of your user base being a community, your customers being a community.

And we're very big into that. So if you're on discord, you know, you can find our discord, join there, talk to me. You know, I try to be as accessible of a CEO as possible in that sense. Yeah, reach out any way possible. And, you know, if you know, if you know Steven personally, I can give him my personal stuff, and if you want to reach out to me through email or through WhatsApp or something like that, I can open that up to you as well. But, yeah, for us, To The Moon is dot, dot, literally.

Stephen: I love it, man. I think this is a conversation that's going to open up a lot of people's eyes. I think they've seen you at conferences, they hear you speak about it, but when you really break it down to these terms, it makes it a lot more digestible. Where like, oh yeah, there's an economy everywhere.

Like, look how much we spent on the metaverse Like, imagine when we get out to like a place like space and

Grant: Well, why do you think, why do you think all these, why do you think all these brands and entities went into the metaverse? Everyone's looking for a different new outlet, a way to do things. And, you know, really the only directions you have are digital worlds now or space, right? So, and, and if I can leave on one inspirational thing, which is, you know, the future of your industry is in space, no matter what, and there's a little alpha for you people.

This isn't public at all yet. Next year on a satellite mission, we're going to do the first proof of concept of crypto mining in space. Why? Crypto mining is just computation, right? At the end of the day. Why are we doing that? Well First off, solar panels, solar tech was built for space. It works in space.

It doesn't work on earth very well. 24 hour pure sunlight, no environmental hazards at all whatsoever to mess with it. So you got pure clean energy that's happening out of it. What's a big issue around computation? Most of the power, a lot of it is getting used for what? Heat, for cooling down. I got all the fans.

Space doesn't really have that issue. It's Cold as hell, right? So if you properly show that you can do it with scale, the future of computation, our partner says five years, I think it's more like 10 years, but the future of computation, AI mining of crypto is going to be in space. There are going to be massive solar farms.

With these with these systems set up to it. And next year we're looking to do the first commercial proof of concept that then we'll take as a concept, get funded more, you know, utilize one of those cool financing models and, you know, turn that into a viable reality. So the future of AI is in space.

The future of crypto is in space, quite literally. And yeah, there's a lot more to that, but I'll stop here before I go into the weeds.

Stephen: And that makes a lot of sense. When you think about the Bitcoin miners are struggling to find kilowatts for a cheap, to your point, most of it is spent in trying to cool down these systems. And once it's out there, I think that the repairs might be a, the repairs might be an issue, but I think you're right.

I think we're about 10 years out for that. And you know, the pressure that AI is getting with this, you know, how much computational power is going into it. We're going to have to find alternatives. I And I love that you're already thinking where it's going to

Grant: one, one third,

Stephen: one of my favorite

Grant: third, just so you guys understand, one third of Ireland's the power grid goes towards data centers. It's not a sustainable thing. We're going to have to take that off earth.

Stephen: Wow. That's a huge number.

Grant, thank you much for joining the Around The Coin podcast.

Grant: Pleasure buddy. Thank you.