November 24 – November 30 (Published December 3rd)
PERSPECTIVES by Steve Payne
16 Crypto Private Financings Raised: $43.2M
Rolling 3-Month-Average: $609.4M
Rolling 52-Week Average: $400.8M
It’s crickets out there. Just because BTC plummeted and the country immediately south of Canada paused for turkey does not mean that investment and building stop. But last week sure was slow.
The largest announced investment last week was SpaceComputer, which raised $10M in seed funding, led by Lattice Capital, Maven 11, and Primitive Ventures, with participation from Arbitrum Foundation, HashKey Group, Nascent, Offchain Labs, Sandeep Nailwal, and others. It is building trustless Web3 infrastructure using orbital computing plus ZK proofs, MPC, and FHE for enhanced security and resilience. In their own words: “The First Blockchain in Space | Confidentiality, Consensus, & Secure Compute in Orbit.”
A lot to unpack here. Basically, SpaceCompute is building the capability to run workloads on satellites. One can ask: how? Or, more importantly, why? It’s not hard to imagine snarky comments. But we are not here to criticize builders; the SpaceCompute team clearly has a big vision but sounds realistic about where they are. And the above roster of lead investors is a smart group that has clearly thought about the value props more than we have.
The core value prop seems to be security; the company talks about a tamperproof, leakproof, and unjammable platform. To the team’s credit, they are also open about potential vulnerabilities: a nascent supply chain, dependency on LEO ground stations, host software and software upgrades, etc. And they acknowledge that today their celestial platform is less trusted than terrestrial platforms. After all, a16z claims that 2025 stablecoin payment volume will reach $9 trillion in transactions; that requires some pretty large trust.
Someone will figure out the technology. Our questions are more about use cases. We like the idea of running a validator in space. And we can geek out on a true random number generator. SpaceCompute has more ideas but is openly asking for additional use cases: what can tolerate latency, intermittent satellite reachability, centralized ground stations, and limited bandwidth? What workloads are worth paying multiple orders of magnitude higher cost? This is a real moonshot, and we’re interested to see how it evolves.
Check this out for an interesting, open presentation on SpaceCompute from last August (Youtube).
