We all have seen some really ambitious projects being launched on Ethereum smart contracts and blockchain technology. We have seen coins that claim insane interest rates on their Proof-of-stake systems, we have seen a decentralized supercomputer being launched but this one is perhaps the most ambitious and to some extent crazy ICO we have ever seen.

Asteroid Ltd, a new company is aiming to float coins to lay claiming rights to nearly 600,000 asteroids present in our vicinity in the Solar system. The idea is to provide a mechanism for claiming rights to nearly half a million asteroids near the Earth. The ICO team believes that since there is no mechanism in space to divide these asteroids among anyone, they are laying claim to them using their blockchain technology and distributed ledger.

But why would anybody want to lay claim to any asteroid in the future? Well, it turns out they have somewhat of a justification as well. According to leading experts in celestial bodies, there are over $700 quintillion dollars worth of mining resources in asteroids in our vicinity!

Since space travel will be a big thing in the future, humans will want to benefit from these immense resources. There are enough resources for everyone on the asteroids and that’s why they are enabling people to lay claim on them.

This is what the team is calling so-called democratization of space. They are calling the proprietary mechanism “Blockclaim” and with the help of this tech, people around the world would be able to lay claim on individual asteroids and even multiple ones according to the number of coins they own. Yeah, it’s as simple as that!

Asteroid Ltd hasn’t certainly stopped at this. They wanted to go further and show that their platform can even be used to search and pay claims using the ASTR tokens (Asteroid Ltd’s native cryptocurrency). Each ASTR token will be backed with a blockclaim outlining the claim of a particular asteroid. These ASTR Coins will then be used for trading purposes in the near future.

Asteroid Ltd is obviously banking on the success of the space missions to bring their project to reality. With each successful mission, the worth of ASTR coins is likely to increase. But, why should it increase? So far, we haven’t been able to send people to Mars. It will take us several decades before we are able to do that anyway. The main asteroid field in the world is even beyond Mars and it is actually located in an orbit in between Mars and Jupiter which is even further away.

These factors are problems at the moment but in the future, they will be irrelevant, which is why it is important to get a foot in the door as an innovator at this early stage!

There have been talks of privatizing space but it has hit multiple roadblocks because of the attitude of some investors and industrialists. One such noted personality even advocated moving a passing-by asteroid and getting it closer and mining it for minerals and natural resources!

Astroid ICO

The pre-ICO of ASTR coins is open. It will run till November 20th, 2017. The main ICO of ASTR coins will start from November 21st, 2017 and will end on December 18th, 2017. Only 100 million tokens will be issued. There is a heavy 75% discount for early contributors. Upon completion of the Token Generation Event, ASTRCOIN will freely trade on cryptocurrency exchanges.  Beyond this, it may be used to register Blockclaims.

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