Marscoin

Marscoin explores the idea of leveraging the power of a peer-to-peer, distributed open cryptocurrency to incentivize space exploration. Marscoin is a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin that is designed specifically for current and future Mars economic research. Marscoin has an active community and is supported (unofficially) by the Mars Society, who was given a large donation of its currency at the onset of the project. The technology behind Marscoin is actively being developed by the Marscoin Foundation of Sarasota, Florida.

Marscoin was founded in 2014 by Lennart Lopin of Sarasota, Florida who was a Mars One candidate and is an active member of The Mars Society. Mr. Lopin has been a speaker multiple times at the Mars Society conferences including his 2014 convention talk which announced the project, and he was included in an Economics on Mars panel in 2019.

In 2019, the Mars Society came out in support of Marscoin publicly as part of an announcement to take cryptocurrency donations. Included in that announcement was the news that Mars Society had taken ownership of the Marscoin donation originally provided to Mars One. This reassignment of the donation was orchestrated by Mr. Lopin and James Burk, the Mars Society's IT Director, who contacted Mars One founder Bas Landsdorp directly to seek and gain his permission.