People already trade on future markets for everything from oil, to corn, to gold. Space Markets is asking: Why not space?
Space Markets, which emerged from stealth today after being founded in December, is also announcing an investment from Coinbase Ventures for an undisclosed amount. The platform will be built on Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 network.
Meet Space Markets: Today’s space industry is built mostly around private contracts that can span years, or even decades. But, as the industry continues to grow, Space Markets CEO Nick Trudgen says now is the time to launch futures trading for commodities in orbit, including satellite bandwidth, launch capacity, and EO data.
“Every major industry eventually develops financial markets around its core resources,” Trudgen said in a statement. “Energy has oil futures, agriculture has commodity markets, and financial markets power global trade. As space infrastructure expands—from satellite networks, to orbital compute, to space-based data centers—the space economy will need the same tools for price discovery, liquidity, and risk management.”
Trudgen gave the example of a company generating energy in orbit. With Space Markets, investors could go to the company and buy a futures contract, committing to purchase that energy in two or three years.
What’s next: Trudgen told Payload that the platform is on track to conduct its first live trade in the next three months. The first three trades will be “event trades” on:
- Starship, considering whether there will be low-cost access and big deployments;
- Compute, considering whether certain types of computing will be in-orbit in the next year;
- Something linked to re-entry.
“The prediction markets are actually the first wedge, the first sort of opening. The actual long-term plan…is a complete decentralized exchange for trading space assets,” Trudgen said. “What we decided to do was—in the beginning—focus on prediction markets, build traction, build trust, and make our platform a center of gravity for information, and make it easy to roll out our trading platform with the companies directly.”
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A European propulsion startup is trying to bring a new kind of thrust to the market.
Switzerland’s Stellar Alpina announced today that it raised a CHF3.5M ($4.5M) pre-seed funding round to support the development of rotating detonation rocket engines (RDRE). These engines can offer more efficient in-space mobility compared to traditional chemical propulsion systems—at least in theory.
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