On July 19, a very unique new blockchain-based project launched. Called Diana, the project intends to effectively tokenize ownership of the moon. The project was announced only a single day prior to the 50th anniversary of man first setting foot on the moon after the Apollo landing.

The project is named after the Roman moon goddess, and it hopes to accomplish two things. It would like to establish definitively who owns the moon, and it also wants to secure the rights to the moon.

One of the many assumptions of the project is that governments will eventually seek to exploit resources that exist in outer space. The creators of the project also believe that, because of this, there will be ownership disputes that the project will resolve through its lunar registry.

Along with the launch, the project's creators released a white paper. This paper prominently quotes the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty, specifically Article II, which says that countries cannot claim sovereignty of the moon or of any other celestial bodies in outer space. Nor can they occupy any of these bodies in any way.

The white paper further states that the treaty does not take into account private ownership of the moon and other bodies, and they believe that this could lead to entities claiming ownership of the moon. However, they think that their project — by tokenizing the moon into nearly 4 billion blocks — will prevent such claims of ownership as well as prevent commercial exploitation of the moon's resources.

On the project's roadmap, the creators have stated that they hope one day to develop a business model for taking possession of the moon.

The project hopes to issue to two separate tokens, both of which will be based on Ethereum ERC-20 tokens. The first will be called DIA tokens, which will tokenize the moon's surface, while MOND tokens will be used specifically for transactions and will be backed by U.S. dollars.

Both NASA and the European Space Agency have previously stated that they are interested in developing blockchain-based solutions relating to their operations.