Bitcoin in Space

The first Bitcoin object to leave the ground did not reach space. It reached a third of the way there, hanging under a weather balloon over England.

In the late summer of 2016 the cloud-mining company Genesis Mining attached a 3D-printed Bitcoin logo, a paper wallet and a camera to a latex weather balloon. As it climbed, two payments of exactly 1 BTC each were broadcast from the ground to the address printed on the paper. The blockchain shows them confirmed in consecutive blocks, 427,507 and 427,508, less than ten minutes apart, on 30 August 2016.

The company reported a peak altitude of 34 km before the balloon burst and the payload came down by parachute. Both addresses were a wink: a wallet starting with 1Genesis… paid a wallet starting with 1Moon….

The paper key that rode to the stratosphere was used again fifteen months later: on 6 December 2017 it moved 2.009 BTC out of the address, which has been empty ever since.

Honest label34 km is the stratosphere. Space begins at the Kármán line, 100 km up. And no bitcoin left the ground: the coins stayed on the ledger while a key took the ride. The altitudes of the two payments (20 km and 34 km) are the company's own account.

The first Bitcoin transaction co-signed by a key in orbit took about a day and a half to complete. That was the point.

On 5 December 2019 at 17:29:24 UTC, a Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral carrying the Dragon cargo ship of mission CRS-19. Among its 2,617 kg of cargo was a small hardware wallet built by SpaceChain, flying a computer from the Danish firm GomSpace and supported by a European Space Agency kick-start grant. Three days later Dragon was berthed to the International Space Station, and the device was later installed on the commercial Nanoracks platform.

The wallet was a 2-of-3 multisignature address: two keys stayed on the ground, the third flew. In June 2020 an unsigned transaction was sent up through a ground station, signed on board, and sent back down. It was confirmed in block 636,529 on 27 June 2020 at 03:42 UTC: 0.00993709 BTC in, 0.001 BTC and 0.00888327 BTC out.

The man who started the transaction, from the ground, was Jeff Garzik, an early Bitcoin Core developer. In 2013 he had proposed BitSat, a fleet of tiny satellites broadcasting the blockchain; a contract for 24 of them was announced in 2015, and none ever flew. Six and a half years after that first idea, a transaction of his was co-signed in orbit.

What the blockchain can and cannot proveThe chain proves a 2-of-3 multisig spend with two valid signatures. It cannot show where a signature was made: that one came from the ISS is SpaceChain's statement, backed by its named partners. No astronaut “sent bitcoin”. What became of the hardware after 2022 is not documented.

No Bitcoin object is known to have flown on Fram2. The mission itself is the exhibit: the first human flight over both poles, bought by a man who started mining bitcoin on a laptop.

Chun Wang discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and co-founded the mining pool F2Pool in 2013. In 2025 he paid for, and commanded, a private SpaceX mission named after the Norwegian polar ship Fram. He has never disclosed the price.

Fram2 lifted off from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center — the Apollo 11 pad — on 1 April 2025 at 01:46:50 UTC and flew south, into an orbit inclined 90° to the equator. For 3 days, 14 hours and 32 minutes its four first-time astronauts saw what no crew on the Space Station can: both poles. The previous record for a crewed orbit's inclination, 65°, had stood since Vostok 6 in 1963.

The crew ran 22 experiments, among them the first X-ray of a human in space, and splashed down in the Pacific off California. In May 2026 SpaceX announced that Wang will fly again: around the Moon on Starship, and later on a flyby of Mars. No dates were given.

What we could not confirmThere is no evidence that SpaceX was paid in bitcoin, or that Wang carried a coin, a wallet or the white paper, or signed a transaction in orbit. The press calls him the first known bitcoiner in orbit; keep the word “known”.

Since August 2017 the whole Bitcoin blockchain has been falling from the sky, free of charge, for anyone with a dish pointed at the right satellite. It still is.

At 35,786 km above the equator a satellite takes exactly one day to circle the Earth, so from the ground it appears to hang motionless. Blockstream does not own any of these satellites. It leases capacity on commercial communications satellites, uplinks every new block from ground stations, and lets the satellites rebroadcast it. Anyone with a small dish and a receiver can keep a Bitcoin node in sync with no internet connection at all.

The service started on 15 August 2017 on Galaxy 18, Eutelsat 113 West A and Telstar 11N; Telstar 18V added Asia-Pacific in December 2018. Version 2.0, in May 2020, switched to the satellite-TV standard DVB-S2 and made it possible to download the entire chain, from the 2009 genesis block, from orbit. A separate API lets anyone pay over Lightning — the minimum bid is one satoshi — to have a message broadcast.

The fleet has a casualty. On 31 January 2024 Eutelsat 113 West A, the relay for South America, suffered an anomaly after eighteen years in orbit and was retired. It now drifts silent, a few hundred kilometers above the geostationary belt. The oldest survivor, Galaxy 18, left Earth in 2008 from a floating platform on the equator in the middle of the Pacific. We checked the service on 14 November 2026: it was transmitting.

One-way streetThe satellite link is a downlink. You cannot send a transaction up to a Blockstream satellite from your dish: messages go to Blockstream over the internet, are paid over Lightning, and only then are uplinked. From 35,786 km the signal takes about 0.12 seconds to arrive.

In January 2024 a physical bitcoin flew farther from Earth than the Moon itself — and still missed it. The whole mission was lost to one valve that would not close.

The coin was commissioned by the exchange BitMEX: a one-off physical bitcoin in the tradition of the Casascius coins, with a public address on its face and the private key engraved beneath a tamper-evident hologram. Exactly 1 BTC was loaded onto that address 77 hours before liftoff. Beside it on Astrobotic's Peregrine lander rode a metal plate from Bitcoin Magazine, etched with the raw hexadecimal data of Bitcoin's genesis block.

The rocket was brand new. Vulcan Centaur had never flown; neither had its two methane-burning BE-4 engines. It lifted off from Space Launch Complex 41 on 8 January 2024 at 07:18:38 UTC, in the middle of the Florida night, and did its job perfectly: fifty minutes later Peregrine separated on course for the Moon. Then a helium valve failed to reseal, the oxidizer tank ruptured, and the lander began to tumble. With minutes to spare, controllers turned its solar panels back to the Sun. But it was leaking, and it would never land.

Peregrine coasted out to about 390,000 km — beyond the Moon's average distance of 384,400 km — but it was flying a long loop designed to meet the Moon later, and the Moon was not there yet. Astrobotic steered it home instead. On 18 January 2024, around 21:04 UTC, after 10 days and 14 hours and more than 861,000 km, it burned up over the South Pacific, south of Fiji.

Unspent, not provably lostThe address still holds 1.01329989 BTC: the original bitcoin plus small tips from the public. Nothing has ever been spent from it. Whether any copy of the private key survives on Earth has never been stated. The Vulcan upper stage that threw the coin toward the Moon is now in orbit around the Sun.

In March 2025, two landers reached the Moon within four days of each other. Each carried the private key to a Bitcoin wallet. Both keys are still there.

The first arrived on 2 March 2025 at 08:34 UTC, when Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost touched down upright in Mare Crisium, the Sea of Crises, after a 45-day journey of about 4.5 million km. On its deck is a golden pyramid small enough to hold in your hand, placed by the company LifeShip. Inside the pyramid, a centimetre-scale device from the start-up Iridia stores wallet keys — Bitcoin among them — in synthetic, DNA-inspired molecules. Iridia published the address after landing. It holds 7,891 satoshis.

The second arrived on 6 March 2025, when Intuitive Machines' lander Athena came down at Mons Mouton, at almost 85° south — the southernmost landing ever — about 250 m from its target, inside a crater, on its side. Its solar panels could not charge, and the mission ended the next day. Strapped to it was Lunar Outpost's MAPP rover, which survived the landing but never rolled out. Laser-engraved on that rover is the key to a wallet called Nakamoto_1, created by the analytics firm LunarCrush as a treasure hunt: whoever reaches the rover can claim it.

Neither wallet is rich. The 2023 headline promised 62 bitcoin for Nakamoto_1; at landing, CNN reported about US$251,000 in mixed crypto-assets, and LunarCrush's chief executive spoke of two bitcoin. And Iridia's wallet, the first on the Moon, is worth a few dollars. The value of both is in where they are.

Which was “first”?The first funded Bitcoin wallet key on the lunar surface is Iridia's (Blue Ghost, 2 March 2025) — though the blockchain shows the same key signing transactions on Earth three days before launch, so a copy existed here. Claims that the Bitcoin white paper was aboard earlier landers come only from their promoters and are not independently confirmed.

Nothing related to Bitcoin has yet travelled beyond the Earth–Moon system. When it does, it will meet the one rule no software update can change: the speed of light.

A radio signal needs 1.28 seconds to reach the Moon. That is 0.2% of Bitcoin's ten-minute block interval: a node on the Moon would keep up with Earth without trouble. On 24 April 2021 five Brazilian radio amateurs made the point in their own way, sending a partially signed Bitcoin transaction as Morse code, bouncing it off the lunar surface and receiving the echo about two and a half seconds later.

Mars is another matter. Depending on where the two planets are in their orbits, a signal takes between about 3 and 22 minutes, one way. At the worst, more than two whole blocks are found on Earth before Mars hears about the first. Mining on Mars against miners on Earth would be hopeless. A 2025 preprint by Jose and Carlos Puente proposes keeping Bitcoin's rules as they are and adding signed “proof-of-transit” timestamps at each relay; it has not been peer-reviewed, and nothing has been tested in space.

Closer to home, the next first may be mining. Starcloud-1, in orbit since November 2025, carries only a graphics processor. Its successor is planned to carry Bitcoin mining chips and has slipped to 2027. As of November 2026, no bitcoin has been mined in orbit.