The announcement of the DOGE-1 mission — a collaboration between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the futurist Geometric Energy Corporation (GEC) — was hailed as the start of the cryptocurrency space race. Dogecoin, the popular meme cryptocurrency, was chosen as the unit of account between SpaceX and GEC, giving Doge a claim on the first unit of space commerce.

However, it is not the only space currency. The initial press release mentioned a number of organisations involved with GEC, several of which are cryptocurrency projects. So, how do these fit in? The answer is space art.

With the astronomic rise in projects tying art to cryptocurrency, it seems that the GEC is looking to test what happens to the value of art — or advertising — when it is strapped to the side of a CubeSat and fired towards the moon.

The article mentioned additional payload space to be dedicated to art in the form of space plaques provided by Geometric Labs and Geometric Gamin Corporation, and since then, four new cryptocurrency projects underwent a low-key release, and rumours began to circulate that the tokens were related to the Doge-1 mission. Their names are Rho, Beta, Kappa and Gamma. Later a fifth project, Xi, was launched.

They have yet to be officially associated with GEC, but a set of websites for the tokens appeared unannounced. Are these tokens part of the space art, and can they be directly tied to GEC? A little digging into the websites and the code for the tokens themselves appear to confirm it.

The websites of the tokens claim they are indeed part of the mission, and that each token will be involved in how the art is displayed on the side of the CubeSat, opening up the possibility that the art could be programmable, changeable or even streamed back to Earth.

Pointblank is collaborating with GEC to build the CubeSats for the mission, and have recently tweeted the hashtags for some tokens. The Pointblank website contains in its source files a picture of one of the tokens.

The man behind GEC is Sam Reid. He launched a new TG group centred around the tokens. This is effectively the missing piece: GEC have now laid claim to the tokens.