The economy on Mars will likely run on cryptocurrency.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stated that any future economy on Mars will likely be cryptocurrency-based.

The tech billionaire, who is also one of the co-founders of online payments giant PayPal which originally strived for a system like Bitcoin, has said in the past that he hopes to send the first humans to Mars as early 2024, with the ultimate aim of setting up a “self-sustaining city on Mars as soon as possible”.

Now, while responding to a Twitter thread started by AI researcher Lex Fridman, Musk stated that a “Mars economy will run on crypto”, suggesting it could be with the novelty cryptocurrency dogecoin which made him the unofficial CEO or a crypto asset named Marscoin.

Although Musk may have been making a joke, the Marscoin project actually exists. Marscoin was founded in 2014 and saw a brief surge in popularity during the cryptocurrency market bull run in late 2017 but its volume has died down. The altcoin currently has a market cap of less than $100,000, according to CoinMarketCap at the time of this report.

In comparison Dogecoin started as a meme is currently sitting at a market cap of $580,928,809 according to Coingecko.

Dogecoin, the project that Musk is the former CEO of, could be a more likely candidate to use. This is given its popularity and that it shares many of the same decentralized properties as Bitcoin.

The SpaceX founder has regularly spoken about his life goal to travel to Mars and earlier this year ordered employees to accelerate the development of the next-generation rocket.

SpaceX has previously stated that it would not recognize international law on Mars, instead, they said they would set up “self-governing principles”.

According to the Terms of Service of SpaceX’s Starlink internet project that TMU reported on, any future settlements on the Red Planet would “recognize Mars as a free planet”, adding that “no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.”

The terms stated: “Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.” Interestingly enough, this is something that could be achieved through blockchain technology and smart contracts.

“It would be people voting directly on issues,” Musk previously said in a 2016 interview. “The potential for corruption is substantially diminished in a direct versus a representative democracy.”