In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, Sunny Ray sits down with Grant, founder of Copernic Space, to explore how tokenization could unlock space as humanity's largest asset class. Grant traces his path from a family shaped by space history, including a grandfather who built Poland's original space program in the 1970s and 80s, and a mother who escaped communist Poland to later run Compaq's expansion across Central and Eastern Europe. He recounts his own entrepreneurial journey, from an early mobile video startup on Palm Treos to co-founding CoinFirm, a pioneering crypto compliance company, before arriving at Copernic Space. Grant explains how Copernic Space is building the financial and commercial infrastructure for the space economy, comparing it to the Dutch East India Company for a new age of exploration. He details how the company fractionalizes and finances real world space assets, citing its 2025 lunar mission that tokenized and landed over two thousand digital payloads on the moon. The conversation covers regulatory hurdles, market psychology, and why space represents a nearly limitless financial frontier.
Copernic Space founder Grant explains how tokenization is turning space exploration into humanity's next trillion-dollar asset class.
What are you building at Copernic Space?
Copernic Space is a financial operating system and marketplace for the space economy. We're not building rockets or satellites, we're building the financial and commercial infrastructure that every major market has needed historically, from the first age of exploration onward. Space is set to become one of the largest asset classes on Earth, and we want to give more people and entities the chance to become stakeholders in it.
Tell us about your grandfather and what he built in Poland.
My grandfather built Poland's original space program in the 70s and 80s, working out of the Air Force. He helped launch Hermaszewski, making Poland the fourth nation to send an astronaut into space. He was a progressive, capitalistic thinker stuck behind the geopolitical realities of communist Poland, and his early writings on democratizing access to space are still archived in Warsaw. Those values are the roots behind Copernic Space.
What did growing up around your mother's career do to your wiring?
My mother escaped communist Poland through Italy with five dollars in her pocket, landed in DC, and eventually beat out seasoned executives to bring Compaq into Central and Eastern Europe after communism fell. She's extremely visionary and fearless, someone who knocks down any door. Growing up around her boardrooms taught me to feel comfortable everywhere, from the penthouse to the street, and to take big home run swings without fear.
Take us to CoinFirm in 2016. What did you and the team see that nobody else did about crypto compliance?
I'm not a financial or AML guy by background, but I could see that if crypto was going to be real, it needed a bridge to how markets actually work. Machine learning could completely change AML, which was manual, ineffective, and used regulatorily to block smaller competitors. That's why I joined the founding team, five of us coming out of crypto and AML backgrounds.
You've said CoinFirm was a better product than Chainalysis but lost on US strategy. What's the lesson, and does it shape how you sell Copernic now?
CoinFirm built a better product than Chainalysis, turning AML from two percent effectiveness into the eighty to ninety percent range through automation. But entrepreneurs, especially outside the US, often think product alone wins and forget the story. There's a toxic humility in a lot of the world that America doesn't have. That's the biggest lesson of my life, and it shapes how deliberately I sell the Copernic Space story now.
What was the actual moment you realized space was going to be the biggest asset class in human history?
It happened around the time we were building CoinFirm. At an early space and defense conference, our CTO pitched crypto mining in space before anyone else was talking about it. My mother and I were already on the ground at early SpaceX launches asking how to combine blockchain with the space market. Once you see that almost anything can become a programmable digital asset, verifying millions of things flying around in space naturally becomes a blockchain problem.
You landed tokenized assets on the moon in March 2025, over 2,000 of them. What does that prove?
We proved that both financing and commercialization work, with everyone from other space companies and brands to artists and individuals who just wanted a family photo in space taking part. It showed the model end to end, acquiring and fractionalizing a payload, commercializing it, and generating returns for the people who provided the liquidity, which is exactly what we did with our Moon Mission One fund.
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