Decentralizing Connectivity from Space - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hi everyone, my name is S Choy. I'm super excited to moderate this fireside chat because with me is my good friend Tay O, founder of Spacecoin. Tay, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me. Uh, hi everyone. My name is Tay O. I'm a founder and CEO of Glua, the devco of creditcoin and spacecoin. Could you start by introducing yourself?

You know, share your background and share what made you to build spacecoin. Started building a blockchain technology uh in around 2012 and in 2017 we started a project called creditcoin. The thesis of creditcoin was there are ideal capital and developed market uh suffer from near to zero interest rate and we wanted to connect those capital to high yield opportunities in emerging markets uh where people are suffering from a lack of financial infrastructure and underbanked or unbanked even. Uh while building this project, we deployed over 100 million loans and uh to two million people. Um and while we are on this mission to of the bank and the unbanked, we learned that many of the unbanked are also unconnected.

Um if you're offline, there's no way for us to serve you. So we wanted to fix this aj problem as well. uh initially looking into existing solutions such as Starlink which works great but the price point is just too expensive for our target demographic. Um you have to pay around $600 for the SA edition and $150 per month as a subscription fee and our target demographic was GDP GDP per capita around $2,000. So it wasn't economically feasible.

Uh so we wanted to see if we can build uh the satellite technology for optimize for more number of links instead of data rate and we successfully convinced ourselves. So we started building the satellite technology for space and while doing so we also learned that this is actually emerging point of two very different innovation uh breakthroughs of the the technology. The first one is as I said the space industry um recently got getting commoditized heavily thanks to the reusable rockets of SpaceX and now the Starlink proved that we can build a satellite technology network and cover global coverage for the uh the telecommunications. Um merging that with blockchain technology which recently has proven that you can create a decentralized network securing trillions of dollars uh we realized that we can actually build a decentralized network of telecommunication satellite and build permissionless connectivity layer and that's how we ended up starting to build spacecoin.

Makes sense. Thank you. So my first question is uh connectivity is often called a human right. What social or economic changes do you foresee when previously unconnected communities gain access to the internet?

So when I asked about the value of connectivity for people, I asked them to reverse the viewpoint. So instead of it's harder to imagine uh people getting people unconnect people getting connected. Uh but imagine you yourself in a situation where you would lose internet access like completely and imagine your productivity compare your productivity then and after um your productivity probably less than ten of what you used to be. So by reversing that you can you can easily imagine people getting connected will improve their pro productivity 10x or even 100x.

Okay. Okay. Um, so I got to ask you why choose space? So, you know, I think building, launching, you know, operating a satellite constellation seems way more difficult than laying a fiber optics cable in the ground. Think of a space or satellite as very very high cell tower by being up higher.

uh while a cell tower on the ground merely covers one kilometers in diameters. Um a satellite in in the sky can cover state. So basically a cell tower essentially covers a block and a satellite up in the sky can cover a state. So that big difference of the the side of the cover coverage uh enables you to build a global level um telecommunication network can can cover the whole globe.

Okay. So okay then why is uh decentralization so important um and how does spacecoin decentralize satellite connectivity. So the current telecommunication infrastructure due to capex is heavily centralized. Um it's basically done by either governments or telos and because it's centralized it enables censorship. Um it uh and it has a degrading uh privacy but all the systems all the technical layers that people use it every day are always PE had a open or permissionless option they they both serve different purposes so for example in the OS uh there's windows but there's open OS um which people mostly use for the customization there's a very uh specific purposes such as Linux.

Uh when it comes to money, there's US dollars and Bitcoin. And in computing, there's AWS or other cloud service providers and Ethereum. Um they both serve a different uh different purpose. And when it comes to connectivity, we only have a centralized permission option. Um but only recently due to the two innovations that I've just mentioned uh the decentralized network and the permissionless connectivity became possible.

And that is why we are building spacecoin.

Okay. So what what types of organization might be interested in joining the spacecoin network and why?

When we start building the technology uh we start to go out there and speak with our potential um clients. So governments, telos and even military um they all wanted this kind of technology for different reasons. So for governments who has been uh promising the bringing connectivity to the remote area of their countries uh but couldn't deliver due to the capital and the lack of technology um obviously want this to connect their unconnected um basically they want to win the next election u for telos who wants to compete against uh companies like Starlink uh doesn't necessarily have satellite technology and also the capex of launch launching your own LEO low earth orbit constellation is too much. Uh to give give you more details on on that is most satellites that you launch for telecommunications is low earth orbit. Um due first due to the cost of launching higher or uh higher orbit and also the second uh if you launch too farther away the latency is too farther away.

So it's better to have a lower orbit, but due to the physics, if you launch an AOE satellite, it has to go around the globe, meaning that the satellite that you have to launch uh will only be on top of your head about like 95% of the time. So basically for a domestic company like uh Telos, um they're wasting 95% of their satellite um launch cost. We brought them the idea of sharing their satellite across different region which which they liked. Uh for military um they saw the what can happen in Ukraine uh due to the Ukraine and they want to have an option to either own and build their own satellites uh because we are an open source project u they couldn't they can build their own satellite or buy a satellite from us and customize it. So they like to have that option as well.

Okay. Uh, have been there any significant regulatory challenges when building spacecoin? I'm thinking maybe getting a license to, you know, you got to deal with the local uh, reg, you know, regulations.

So, if you're launching a satellite, especially a telecommunication satellites, um, you had to get approval from two different governing bodies. In our case, because we're launching from the United States mostly, we launch we get we have to get approval from the FAA, uh, which dictates what goes in the sky. And number two, we had to get approval from the FCC. Uh basically, they govern the spectrum. Um in our case, we got the approval from those two bodies for our first launch and our upcoming second launch.

Okay. So your project um brings together blockchain, telecommunication and space technology. Uh what are some of the challenges you faced in building and bridging the multi-disiplinary teams? So as you said we are uh integrating three very different engineering group um blockchain of course but satellite space technology which is and the telecommunication um engineers and they those three never really had to work with each other and they don't know um under they don't know or necessarily understand what other two technology can do or will do. So I sit in the middle communicating with all three um and help them been in the middle and it's it's it's challenging but very necessary and also very fun because they so each engineering group never really had to work with the other um sector so it's very exciting for them.

Okay. Um so who are the key people behind the project? Um our company Glua has been building the blockchain technology uh for about a decade now and they are handling all the blockchain related um technology development. Uh our chief architect David Levy is uh in charge of that. Uh for space um our director of space in uh architecture Adam Wexler um is in charge of managing all our space engineers engineering team and uh accomplishing the satellite as we designed.

Uh lastly uh our telco advisor ex CEO of Samsung Dr. Yoni Kim and his team um is helping us building the telco architecture and building the telecommunication technology that's needed to fulfill our mission. Sounds great. So lastly, could you please share uh the latest updates on the project and is there anything else you would like to share?

Um so I would like to share that the CTC0 that which we launched in December 2024. Um if the mission of CTC0 was to prove that we can make one we can make the ground to space connectivity and number two that blockchain transaction over a satellite can happen and we have successfully um made the blockchain transaction through our first satellite CTC from Chile to uh Portugal which is about 7,000 kilometers uh away. Um by by completing this we now are we we now have proved that our technology can make a blockchain transaction through space and now we're moving on to our next mission which is CTC1 uh launching three satellites. Then with this mission we're going to prove interatellite connectivity a satellite basically talking to each other and satellite handover meaning that ground station getting gracefully handing over from one satellite to the next one. And lastly, uh we're gonna use the uh three satellite to show that we can expand the coverage of satellites.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed every bit of our conversation today. Um I cannot wait to see how Spacecoin's vision unfold in the near future. Uh so thank you again for your time and to everyone here. Uh thanks for joining our chat.

Thank you.

Thank you.