“There will
definitely be a MarsCoin!”
— Elon Musk · 12:09 AM · Feb 17, 2021
He never built it, so we did — and we gave it something to do. $MARS buys compute on a planetary network that runs on the real Mars: NASA's laser-altimeter elevation, the IAU's 2,049 named landmarks, and a live Mars clock.
Mars is too vast
for one machine.
We turn distributed compute into a planetary instrument.
Every contributed cycle resolves another piece of Mars: its terrain, its hazards, where a habitat could stand, what a rover could cross, how much sun a panel would catch. The output is a public model that gets sharper every day.
21 nodes contributing in this lattice · live
It started as a
throwaway reply.
February 2021. Musk is publicly worried about Dogecoin whale concentration. A follower suggests starting fresh. CZ names it. Musk promises it. Then nothing — for five years the most famous unlaunched coin in crypto just sat there.
- Elon Musk@elonmusk· Feb 15, 2021
“If major Dogecoin holders sell most of their coins, it will get my full support. Too much concentration is the only real issue imo.”
- Mansour Shahrokh@MansourShahrokh· Feb 15, 2021
Suggests a fresh coin instead — offer it to the small holders, skip enriching the whales, and make it the currency of the Earth.
Paraphrased
- Elon Musk@elonmusk· Feb 15, 2021
“Only if necessary”
- CZ@cz_binance· Feb 16, 2021
“It is necessary. Maybe call it MarsCoin?”
- Elon Musk@elonmusk· Feb 17, 2021
“There will definitely be a MarsCoin!”
Mars cannot share
our ledger.
The promise was the easy part. The reason came later, when Musk was asked whether Dogecoin could simply be the currency of Mars. His answer was that it could not — not for any reason of policy, but because of the speed of light.
Mars would need its own local currency. Light takes minutes to cross the gap, so anything that depends on staying tightly in step with Earth cannot work there.
Two books, not one
A wallet holds an Earth balance and a Mars balance. There is no single synced number, because physics does not permit one.
Local settles instantly
Compute, missions and mining all clear on the Mars book the moment they happen. The colony never waits on Earth for anything.
Crossing costs real time
Move value between the books and it travels at light speed — leaving one side at once, arriving minutes later. It cannot be recalled.
And the money itself becomes mass and energy.
Asked what the currency would eventually be, his answer was that dollars would not be — it would be mass and energy. So that is what this colony's reserves are measured in, and they are computed rather than declared: every kilowatt-hour and every tonne comes from a verified job on real NASA data. The base can only grow when someone resolves more of the planet.
Snapshot of 2026-07-31 · nothing convertible, no exchange rate offered.
Explore the
real planet.
Click anywhere on Mars. Every readout is computed on the spot — the local true solar time at that longitude, the sun's angle above that horizon right now, the power a flat panel would catch, and which IAU-approved landmark you are standing in.
Relief is stylised; coordinates, terminator, sun geometry and the landmark catalogue are computed from published values.
Perseverance landing site
Workloads that
resolve a world.
Three job families, each one a measurement rather than a rendering. A node takes the work, runs it against public planetary data, and returns a receipt that anyone can replay.
Terrain & hazards
Sample real elevation across a region, derive slope from the height gradient, and classify every cell against the rover mobility limit.
Solar & seasons
Integrate a full sol of true sun angles at a site to get its energy yield, driven by the same algorithm NASA uses to keep Mars time.
Routes & habitats
A* traverses weighted by real climb, and a sliding search for the flattest buildable pad — scored on cut-and-fill against measured ground.
The planet
is running.
Real rovers keeping real time, and the jobs this network has already run against their ground. Every receipt commits to the one before it.
- Traverse solveJezero Crater5,066 nodes934053c25c2ca1a0cf…← 0049e8b666…sol 1958n-9ebd2e
- Traverse solveElysium Planitia1,469 nodes0049e8b666d0941066…← a90da68f76…sol 1955n-9bbd29
- Slope classificationUtopia Planitia3,166 cellsa90da68f76f02773df…← e0e4e9bc89…sol 1952n-9cbd2b
- Traverse solveValles Marineris8,177 nodese0e4e9bc89b5465469…← aa189b76cf…sol 1949n-99bd26
- Pad searchGale Crater4,623 padsaa189b76cf4073f465…← d4125da0b2…sol 1946n-9abd28
- Ice stabilityValles Marineris8,644 cellsd4125da0b29b07ca66…← 1c4eb9b2ff…sol 1943n-97bd23
- Slope classificationJezero Crater6,907 cells1c4eb9b2ff449ddee3…← 3de3029521…sol 1940n-98bd24
From cycles
to discovery.
Four steps, one loop. Nothing enters the ledger that a node did not actually compute, and nothing is computed that does not point at a real place on the planet.
- 01
Explore
Find a real place on Mars worth resolving.
- 02
Dispatch
Spend $MARS; a node on the network takes the job.
- 03
Compute
The workload runs against measured NASA elevation.
- 04
Commit
A hash-chained receipt lands in the public ledger.
$MARS settles on
Robinhood Chain.
The two-ledger argument needs somewhere for the Earth book to live, and it has to be somewhere cheap enough to pay for a compute job and final enough that the receipt still means something years later.
Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum Orbit layer 2 that has been open and permissionless since July 1, 2026. Jobs clear on the L2 in the time it takes to read this sentence, and the batches settle down to Ethereum — so a receipt is fast where it needs to be fast and permanent where it needs to be permanent. Gas is paid in ETH, not in $MARS, so dispatching work never competes with securing the chain.
- Network
- Robinhood Chain
- Chain ID
- 4663
- Gas token
- ETH
- Stack
- Arbitrum Orbit L2
- Settles to
- Ethereum
- Mainnet since
- July 1, 2026
https://rpc.mainnet.chain.robinhood.com