1 of 1 Gold Mission Patch

If you missed me posting on LinkedIn and Twitter over the last few days, then you’re probably asking yourself what these cool mission patch things are. 

At Spaced Ventures we’re inspired by the space and humanities attempts to explore over the last 50+ years. One of the iconic mementos of space exploration has been the mission patches that NASA and others have released. So we want to continue that tradition.

As we work on getting mission patches integrated into our everyday investment flows, I personally wanted to take a stab designing our own. So we went ahead and created these mission patches as a thank you to the investors who’ve taken a risk and helped us build Spaced Ventures so far.

But I also wanted to give others who didn’t have a chance to invest in Spaced Ventures the opportunity to share in the fun, so we created a second patch. The golden patch went to the first person who could figure out the Easter Egg we hid in our investor patch.

Honestly, I did this because I thought it would be fun and had no clue so many would engage with the hunt. The variety of people joining in from many different backgrounds was really cool to see! The guesses themselves were awesome and gave me many more ideas for the future.

❤️ Here are some of our favorites

🤖 Why the NFTs and not normal Patches? 

NFTs can be divisive. Some say it’s the future and others say NFTs are a Ponzi scheme. I wanted to give NFTs a try because I think it can solve a fundamental scaling problem with crowdfunding — rewards. I’ve always wanted to create mission patches but if I wanted to include every investor on our site, I’d have not only to make the patches but also ship them to hundreds or thousands of places, potentially all over the world. That isn’t cost-effective, time-efficient or environmentally friendly at all. NFTs could be a solution to this problem. But there are several challenges that we’re working to solve including, learning curves around how to hold an NFT, how to mint NFTs at scale, and how to make them as cool as a physical mission patch (I’m hoping we’ve done that with these designs). We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’ll keep trying.

🏆 And the winner is?

Thad Blankenship, a software engineer from Little Rock who guessed correctly that we hid an encoded message in binary on the mission patch.  The message when translated from binary to text reads “I invest in the future” which is what all of our Spaced Ventures investors do with pride!