The asteroid mining company Exploration Laboratories LLC, or ExLabs, will turn to NFTs to raise funds for its speculative space venture.
On Tuesday, Exploration Laboratories LLC, or ExLabs, announced that it is resorting to additional “unconventional” seed funding initiatives for its speculative space venture—through NFTs. Specifically, the company plans to use NFTs to explore space and mine asteroids. ExLabs is a startup developing asteroid mining tech with staff who used to work at NASA and SpaceX.
ExLabs’s Chief Engineer, Miguel Pascual, and Head of Operations, Matthew Schmidgall, sat down with Motherboard and said they are looking at the NFT project as a means to an end.
“We’re an aerospace company first doing an NFT project,” Schmidgall said. “We aren’t a company that’s built around an NFT project. Our main focus isn’t in figuring out how to solidify and corner all of the elements of the NFT ecosystem―we want to be a part of it and help it evolve into a format that actually works and is trustworthy.”
The Crux of the Project
According to Pascual, they will use the NFTs to generate revenue and develop a community from which they can harvest ideas and talent when the need arises.
“The whole point of embarking on this side project is to be able to scale our engineering. And so, if talent exists within the community, specifically to contribute to the project on a significant level, we want to speak with those individuals directly,” said Pascual. “We have an opportunity to create some awesome artwork with really talented artists and share that vision for what that’s going to be. But really, we just hope to be, you know, inspirational the same way SpaceX has been.”
The ExLabs NFT collection would hopefully raise funds the company can use to fire mining equipment into deep space, land on asteroids, and extract precious resources that will be brought back to Earth.
What’s in Store for Holders
Currently, ExLabs hasn’t yet set an official minting date, nor has it disclosed how much the NFTs would cost or the token supply. Nevertheless, the company did imply that it has big plans for the project, and the upcoming “Explorers Club” NFT is just the icing on the cake.
In its press release, ExLabs stated that holders of the Explorers Club NFT would be able to “experience what it would be like for humans to be out in space, off the planet, conducting industry research, and mining riches from space.”
Holders of the NFTs will get daily token rewards. What’s more, those who wager money converted to “Exploration” tokens will be rewarded with NFTs and possible job opportunities.
The press release further states holders of the first Explorer Club NFTs “will automatically become members and get 10 Exploration Tokens per day. The tokens can be redeemed for exclusive benefits, including launching the holder’s name into space, advising on future company designs and community decisions, placing art on next-generation task vehicles, and possible ownership of actual asteroid fragments.”
“Explorers Club members will be part of a community that supports an important advancement and will witness the ambitious yet attainable goals of utilizing the limitless resources space has to offer come to life,” the press release.
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