SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos believe humanity’s survival depends on our ability to become a multiplanetary species. Since the inception of private space flights, more than 600 humans have traveled outside Earth’s atmosphere. But the typical price tag makes space tourism exclusive to a select few.
MoonDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization harnessing blockchain technology to decentralize space research and exploration. Founded with the mission to put space “in the hands of the people,” MoonDAO’s international community uses governance tokens to vote on funding initiatives such as purchasing two tickets on a forthcoming Blue Origin flight.
One of those tickets was slated for anyone who minted one of MoonDAO’s 9,060 free space NFTs to win through a publicly auditable random on-chain drawing. Today, MoonDAO announced it integrated Chainlink VRF – the industry standard for decentralized on-chain random number generation (RNG) – to select the winning NFT.
MoonDAO was founded by a small team that posits DAOs as a better alternative to BigTech for pursuing human innovation.
“At MoonDAO, we take things a little further than simply democratizing space,” co-founder Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz told Chainlink Today. “We want to decentralize that power so that we can have an optimistic future that everyone is involved in regardless of their financial means.”
He said integrating Chainlink VRF to randomly select the Blue Origin ticket winner was essential to ensuring the transparency and integrity of MoonDAO’s mission.
“With Chainlink’s technology, we were able to write a smart contract and call the contract on a livestream so that anyone can audit how our contract is selecting the winners. This was huge for us. The alternative to this would have been to allow a third party to select the winners, but that would have been a black box process, so having a smart contract integrated with Chainlink VRF really took us to the next level.”
The winning NFT holder, who was selected and notified on June 11th, is currently being screened to meet Blue Origin’s astronaut training requirements. Moncada-Larrotiz said that as soon as that process is complete, an official announcement will be made to the MoonDAO community, which draws members from around the globe to propose and vote on funding space exploration projects from the bottom-up.
“We have a massive community in China and the U.S. and we are expanding in South America, Europe, and Africa,” Moncada-Larrotiz said. “We want to improve collaboration between people from all over the world and give them the funds to work together on the biggest problems facing humanity today: becoming a multi-planet species and overcoming The Great Filter.”
To learn more about MoonDAO, visit their website, Twitter, Discord, and GitHub.