Dallas Santana of Space Blue opened his session at Mining Disrupt Miami 2024, held June 24–26, 2024, by closing a loop. A year earlier he had stood on the same stage and announced that Space Blue would send a time capsule to the Moon on a SpaceX Falcon 9. This time he came back to report the result, then handed the microphone to Scarlett Arana, co-founder of Bitbasel, a Miami crypto art community whose artists' work travelled with the capsule. The 13-minute session was a pitch with a specific request attached: both speakers wanted partners, and Santana asked the room for a Bitcoin mining company.
I'm glad to come back here today and say it happened.
Dallas Santana · 0:49
What landed in February 2024
Santana said the payload launched on February 15, 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center and landed on February 22, which he described as the first United States landing on the Moon since 1972. The payload was Space Blue's Lunaprise Museum, which flew on Odysseus, the Intuitive Machines lander. Art press coverage at the time reported that it carried the work of 222 artists.
On February 22nd, we made history with the first landing for the United States since 1972.
Dallas Santana · 0:56
According to Santana, the team had spent several years in the blockchain community gathering what he called important assets and important stories. The Bitcoin material was inscribed on metallic disks: an inscription of Satoshi, the Bitcoin white paper, and early Ordinals projects started the year before. He also listed his own dog, Marshmallow, and characters from Stan Lee's final legacy, which he said were also inscribed onto Bitcoin the year before. He said the metal structure is built to last over a billion years.
He framed the result as a first. In his words, Space Blue and the Lunar Prize mission became the first organization in the world to land Bitcoin projects on the Moon. That is the company's own claim, made from the stage.
A mining node on the Moon, and a request
The second announcement was a plan rather than a result. Santana said Space Blue intended to operate the first Bitcoin mining node on the Moon that fall. The company had the infrastructure and the hardware, he said, built to last the 13 days of the mission, with the node live and sending data back to Earth over two-way communications. What it lacked was a miner.
We need a mining partner to work with us on that.
Dallas Santana · 3:08
He pointed interested companies to the Bitbasel Art Gallery on the show floor, where he would be until early afternoon, and invited a mining company that wanted to bring its technology to the Moon to join. Near the end of the session he added a deadline: the next mission, scheduled for that fall, would close to new partners in 30 days.
Why Bitcoin belongs in the archive
Santana's case for putting Bitcoin on the Moon rested on how he sees the network. He called it an unstoppable ecosystem and said the team views it as permanent for as long as people are on Earth. The Moon archive, in his telling, is the other half of that idea: a backup kept off the planet.
We think that the Bitcoin network is going to be eternal.
Dallas Santana · 3:50
He said the mission's purpose was to make sure that, if human beings make mistakes, there is a copy of our data, our information, our culture and our music on the Moon. He added that the capsule also holds art, sports material and other items that will be inscribed onto the Bitcoin network.
222 artists and an Ordinals marketplace
Arana introduced Bitbasel as a crypto art community and said she was there to talk about what she called off-world assets. Bitbasel runs a marketplace for Ordinals, inscriptions on Bitcoin's base layer, and she said 222 artists are part of the Lunar Prize, with their work to be inscribed through the Bitbasel marketplace. She described the marketplace, built with Space Blue, as the first Web3 marketplace in the world of its kind, and said it runs on ICP, the Internet Computer Protocol, and was ready to deploy.
We're allowing artists to be evangelists, to learn about Bitcoin, to inscribe their art for [provenance] and permanence on layer one.
Scarlett Arana · 7:36
Her pitch to the room was aimed at miners. She asked them to support the artists and the programming, saying Bitcoin comes down to the miners at its roots, and she tied the artists' work to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Bitbasel is based in Miami and has been in the ecosystem since 2020, she said.
Music on the Moon: TuneFM and Summer of Love
Before handing over, Santana announced a partnership with TuneFM, which he described as a music platform similar to Spotify but built around blockchain technology, with the aim of fairer treatment for creators. He named the founder only as Andrew, who he said has been in blockchain for more than a decade. The joint project is called Summer of Love, and Santana said Billboard and Rolling Stone had written about the music Space Blue sent to the Moon.
He said the capsule holds unreleased songs by Jimi Hendrix, along with Bob Marley, Elvis Presley and other artists from the 1960s. The plan he described had three parts: a TuneFM marketplace opening in July where people could log in and inscribe the music assets; a Bitbasel Ordinals collection built around a special album; and a certified one-of-one copy of the metal plate that went to the Moon, to be auctioned later in the year. He said the team had secured rights to the music and would likely start by inscribing the album covers.
The name comes from 1969. Santana noted that the Woodstock festival followed the first crewed Moon landing that summer, and said the team found the story while curating the museum and looking at what was happening on Earth when people first went to the Moon.
Then and now
The session was recorded in June 2024, four months after the landing, and it reports plans for a Bitcoin mining node on the Moon later that year. This story does not confirm whether that node flew; the plan is reported here as the speakers gave it.
Bitcoin traded at $61,272 when Santana and Arana spoke in June 2024 and at $81,466 on October 17, 2026. The conversation continues at Mining Disrupt 2027, March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.