At last, a practical application for my Bored Ape avatar! Buying an extraordinary trip to the stars… with fake cash! Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is already taking Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana as payments for your space tourism adventure. I mean, sure, why not? Let’s base our ticket off of assets more volatile than my dating life, in order to get off this rock. Is this how we start to break free from the bear market. Literally?
To the Moon, Alice, With Crypto
Let's be real.tickers=”TSLA” timestamp=”11-06-2022″ insert_tickers=”false” ] So is this truly a historic crypto adoption breakthrough, or a typical billionaire stunt? I get it, space is cool. Crypto is... well, was cool. This Venn diagram depicts two overlapping yet very identifiable groups. One group includes everyone who can afford a Blue Origin trip, the other includes everyone who wants to pay for it in crypto. It’s maybe a little bit of Justin Sun and five other dudes trying to out-bore each other. What about the time that he bought his seat in 2021 for $28 million? Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it? Still haven’t figured out what he did up there though.
Think about it. After all, you’re about to spend big bucks on a trip of a lifetime. How much are you willing to risk your ticket price? It might swing up and down drastically simply due to Elon Musk’s latest tweet or a new DeFi hack that goes public. The alternative is purchasing your ticket with ETH at a time when ETH is worth $4,000 and ETH prices crashing to $2,000 before the launch occurs. And suddenly that trip to space seems quite a bit less… stellar.
Solana to the Stars? Really?
I hear the Solana defenders coming. Speed, scalability, low transaction fees. All the buzzwords. The article I read was almost adulatory about it, hailing it as the new thing by pointing to its increasing TVL and daily active users. But hey, forget about Solana’s recurring shutdowns and security blunders. Do I seriously want my space tourism purchase to be the one that brings the whole damn blockchain crashing down. No, thank you. My anxiety is bad enough as it is, I’d be crazy!
Best Wallet Token (BEST). A larger utility token for an emerging Web3 wallets ecosystem? Seriously? Are we just seeing the crypto version of purchasing timeshares in the Caribbean? Of course, it boasts yield farming, cashback, and lower transaction fees. But it's in presale. Translation: it's about as stable as a Jenga tower during an earthquake. High potential upside, they say. High potential for rug pull, I say.
Make no mistake, I’m not saying that crypto/ DeFi doesn’t have a future. Maybe Ethereum, with its institutional backing and DeFi dominance, really is the backbone of something real. But don’t kid yourselves into thinking that accepting crypto for space tourism is a turning point. It's a marketing stunt, plain and simple.
NFTs in Orbit: Peak Hype?
Here's the real question: is this just the beginning of the NFT-ification of everything? Next will we see Blue Origin begin selling franchise NFT tickets to space? Now picture this, instead of buying a ticket on Virgin Galactic’s website, you instead buy the digital technology unique ownership access token. Sounds ridiculous? Maybe. But hey, let’s keep it one hundred — we’ve seen stranger things come to fruition in the NFT world. Perhaps NFT holders could receive discounts on the flight tickets?
And what about the environmental impact? Are we really going to celebrate using massive amounts of energy to power blockchains so a handful of billionaires can take joyrides into space? While the planet melts? Perhaps, just perhaps, we should be rooting for crypto to be used for something a little less… speculative. Such as, I don’t know, building America’s renewable energy projects or solving world hunger?
What if, instead, we funded human space exploration by sending fewer mega-rich individuals on extravagant space flights? Let’s mint an NFT that benefits global hunger efforts instead. Blockchain to the Rescue What if we used the blockchain to track donations and provide transparency? Wouldn’t that be a better and more productive use of this technology?
So, is Blue Origin’s crypto embrace the end of NFT hype? Maybe. Or perhaps it’s only an indicator that we’ve truly lost the plot. Whichever side of this debate you fall, I for one plan on continuing to purchase my space-themed t-shirts in good old-fashioned fiat currency. At least that transaction is (relatively) stable. And my Bored Ape will have to remain rooted to the earth for the time being.
