ConsenSys blockchain study acquires asteroid companies Planetary Resources – GeekWire

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Planetary Resources & # 39; Chris Lewicki
Planetary Resources President and CEO Chris Lewicki talks about the company's satellite ambitions in the GeekWire Summit 2014. (Photo GeekWire)

After months of financial uncertainty, the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources states that its assets have been acquired by the block-block company ConsenSys based in Brooklyn.

In a press release, Planetary Resources said that its CEO and chairman, Chris Lewicki, and general counsel Brian Israel joined ConsenSys in relation to the acquisition. ConsenSys will manage its space initiatives from the former Planetary Resources facility in Redmond, Washington.

Further details on the transaction are reserved, Stacey Tearne, spokesperson for Planetary Resources, told GeekWire in an e-mail.

Consensus is a production studio that creates businesses in a wide range of business areas based on the Etherium platform for cryptocurrency and other blockchain applications. It generated 50 companies, or "spokes", including an online poker site, a legal services site and an "integrated transmedia universe with blockchain technology" called Cellarius.

The founder of the company is Joe Lubin, who co-founded Etherium. Today, Lubin paid tribute to Planetary Resources for its "world-class talent, its record of innovation and to inspire people across the planet to support its bold vision for the future."

"Bringing deep-space capabilities into ConsenSys' ecosystem reflects our belief in Ethereum's potential to help humanity create new systems of social rules through automatic trust and guaranteed execution," he said. said Lubin in a statement. "It reflects our belief in democratizing and decentralizing the efforts of space to unite our species and unlock untapped human potential, and we can not wait to share our plans and join us on this journey in the coming months. . "

In the prepared comments, Lewicki looked back at Planetary Resources and looked ahead to ConsenSys.

"Over the course of nearly a decade, Planetary Resources has simultaneously paved the way for technology, business, law and politics, and has brought the promise of space resources irreversibly closer to the reach of humanity," He said. "I am proud of our team's outstanding achievements, grateful to our visionary supporters, and happy to join ConsenSys in building on top of our work to expand the sphere of economic influence of humanity in the solar system."

Israel, meanwhile, has mentioned the plans of ConsenSys for future space adventures.

"The Ethereum Intelligent Contracting Feature is a natural solution for private order and space commerce – the only domain of unordered human activity around territorial sovereignty – in which a wide range of actors from a growing number of countries must coordinate and negotiate, "he said.

A similar strategy is pursued by Asgardia, an initiative that sparked the legal debate defining the first space nation. Asgardia said it wanted to create an independent space-based data storage platform and its blockchain-based cryptocurrency known as Solar.

Planetary Resources was founded in its current form in 2012, with initial support from billionaires such as Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot Jr. and Charles Simonyi. Its original mission was to identify and extract nearby Earth asteroids for valuable resources, which went from the water that could be converted into rocket fuel to platinum group metals that could be sent to Earth.

Over the course of six years, the company has raised tens of millions of dollars and explored other potential revenue streams, including the production of space telescopes, space selfies and a constellation of Earth observation called Ceres.

The company has sent in orbit two small experimental satellites, known as Arkyd-3R and Arkyd-6A, to lay the groundwork for asteroid scouting. His plans called for serious exploration efforts to start in the early years of 2020, fueled by new funding. But an early round of financing failed to come together, leading to a wave of staff cuts.

At one point, Planetary Resources planned to auction the equipment at its Redmond headquarters (but not including a spare satellite it held in storage). That sale was suspended in August and has now been canceled.

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